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Floor Speech
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Mrs. MURRAY. It is ridiculous to claim that this bill protects IVF when it does nothing of the sort. In fact, it explicitly allows States to restrict IVF in all sorts of ways. It is literally in the bill text.
Remember, it did not take State lawmakers in Alabama passing a ban on IVF for clinics in the State to suspend services.
Under this bill, there are a million ways Republican-led States could enact burdensome and unnecessary requirements and create the kind of legal uncertainty and risk that would force clinics to once again close their doors.
Also, even though it is an inherent part of the IVF process that families will make more embryos than they need, this bill does absolutely nothing--not a single thing--to ensure families who use IVF can have their clinics dispose of unused embryos without facing legal threats for a standard medical procedure. Instead, this bill completely ignores the matter of what happens to frozen embryos in order to appease Republicans' extreme anti-abortion allies.
This was intentional, and it leaves the door open to a lot of chaos. So this Republican bill really is a PR tool, plain and simple. It is just another way for Republicans to pretend they are not the extremists that they keep proving they are.
Meanwhile, there are bills some Republicans are pushing for right now that would enshrine, as a matter of law, that life begins at conception and that discarding unused embryos is essentially murder.
Senator Cruz himself supported a personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No way around that. The junior Senator from Texas wanted to change the U.S. Constitution to give embryos the same rights as living, breathing human beings. Look, the stone-cold reality is that you cannot protect IVF and champion fetal personhood.
So I would like to ask my colleagues who are offering this enormously inadequate bill--and I hope they do answer it directly--do you support letting parents have clinics dispose of unused embryos, which is a typical part of the IVF process, or do you support fetal personhood, which by its very nature will throw IVF access into chaos? Because until they clearly answer that question--and it is a couple simple ones--all the claims of supporting IVF will fall obviously short, just like this bill does.
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