Durbin Reflects On Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing On The Devastating Fallout Since The Supreme Court Overruled Roe V. Wade

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"The American people have united together in support of the belief that reproductive rights are a fundamental right, and that extremist politicians have no business dictating the health care decisions of women and their doctors. Just a few days ago, Republican lawmakers in two states failed to pass restrictive abortion laws. And these weren't blue states--far from it, [they were] South Carolina and Nebraska. Cheers actually erupted outside the Nebraska legislature when their proposed abortion ban failed. To some, the failure of these abortion bans, in Republican-controlled states, may be surprising. But if you've been paying attention over the past year, it's the only rational outcome. In the months since the disastrous Dobbs decision, at least a dozen states have enacted near-total bans on abortion. And the number of horror stories that have emerged as a result of them is staggering.

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Perhaps the Court's conservative majority should have paid closer attention to amicus briefs filed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association, who gave Justice Alito and the majority on the Supreme Court a fair warning about what was going to happen--an immediate health care crisis across America.

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Several hours later, her daughter arrived, stillborn. Amanda spent the next three days in the I.C.U. fighting for her own life. She has spent the last eight months battling trauma and depression, as well as the medical fallout from her delayed treatment, including complications that may make it difficult to ever have children.

Regrettably, some of our Republican colleagues tried to make last week's hearing about what they called "late-term' abortions and "partial birth' abortions. What they neglected to note is that abortions after 21 weeks account for less than one percent of abortions in this country, according to the CDC. They also failed to acknowledge that in the very rare instances when an abortion happens later in a pregnancy, it is generally because the woman's life is in danger, or a [fatal] fetal anomaly has been discovered, or because a woman wasn't able to get an abortion earlier [in her pregnancy] due to restrictive state laws.

Many families are deciding Republicans have gone too far with the Dobbs decision and [that] what's happening across the country is not only chaotic, it's immoral. It's immoral to have a young woman like Amanda face death when she was trying to do everything possible to have a baby and be a mother… I hope that the Senate Judiciary Committee can continue to bring this item before the American people."

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