Providing for Consideration of H.R. Department of Defense Appropriations Act, Providing for Consideration of H.R. Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2025

Floor Speech

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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Speaker, 48 years ago, a teenage girl about to enter her senior year in high school made a very difficult and personal choice. She was young and didn't come from any money. Her boyfriend was just a year older and preferred surfing over working. Family and friends all had opinions on what she should do. Yes, she was pushed to have an abortion, but the girl knew that what happened to her body was her choice.

I stand before you today as my mother's choice, a right she fully exercised, knowing that the decision whether to have a baby was hers and hers alone.

Two years ago, with the Dobbs decision, six unelected, conservative Justices robbed women of their basic human right to make decisions, to make choices about their family, their relationships, and their bodily autonomy. They reversed half a century of legal precedent and opened the door for far-right politicians to ban, restrict, and interfere with a woman's right to have an abortion and access reproductive care.

We know that we are awaiting yet another decision from the Supreme Court on whether women can get lifesaving abortion care over the extreme abortion bans being enacted across our country.

Today, we see the harmful and even deadly impacts of this reckless and irresponsible decision. One estimate projected that over 171,000 women were forced to cross State lines for abortion care last year, some even crossing the ocean to my home State of Hawaii. While many of these women are being forced to leave the red State that they live in to access the healthcare that they need, Republicans just won't stop.

Earlier this year, our colleagues on the Republican Study Committee endorsed a nationwide ban on abortion with zero exceptions. That cruel vision is reflected in the dangerous and inhumane policy riders the Republicans have inserted into our government spending bills, including those that would be considered under this rule.

Democrats have pushed back against this relentless assault on women across the country by introducing H.R. 12, the Women's Health Protection Act. This bill would reinstate the constitutional protections to privacy and bodily autonomy that Roe v. Wade provided and further prevent governments from interfering with access to abortion care and reproductive health services in the future.

Hawaii, which I am very proud to represent here in these Halls, was at the forefront of protecting a woman's right to choose by being the very first State to legalize abortion. Since then, we have vigilantly and will continue to fight to protect those rights we fought so hard for over 50 years ago.

That is why I stand before you today. I am here to call on my colleagues to stand with us in firmly rejecting these harmful attacks on women, the girls and women in all of our lives.

We deserve a choice. I was once a choice. I know my mother never would have imagined that her granddaughters would be living in a world where they had fewer rights, fewer choices, than she did.

My nieces deserve the right to make choices for themselves about when to start a family and what happens to their bodies.

For my nieces, for all of our nieces, for all of the girls and women of our country, I ask my colleagues to defeat the previous question so that we can bring up the Women's Health Protection Act.

Mr. AUSTIN SCOTT of Georgia.

Our national debt is $35 trillion. The current deficit is $2.5 trillion. We are not at war, and we are not in the middle of a healthcare emergency.

I will admit the national debt went up a lot during COVID. We did a lot of things very quickly to help the American citizens. Some of that spending was necessary and all of that spending was bipartisan, unlike what the Democrats did with what they call the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan where they spent $3 trillion without a single Republican vote and didn't even put the money through the appropriations process.

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