Democratic Senate Candidate Shenna Bellows Highlights Republican Susan Collins' Election-Year Reversal Today On Women's Health
Press Release
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Shenna Bellows today highlighted her opponent Republican Susan Collins' election-year flip-flop on women's health coverage and access to birth control after Collins voted minutes ago for a Democratic bill to overturn the divisive Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling. Collins broke with Sen. Olympia Snowe in 2012 to vote in favor of the Blunt Amendment, which would have gone even further than the Hobby Lobby ruling in allowing corporations to decide what health coverage to offer their employees, and to confirm Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Hobby Lobby decision.
"Republican attacks on birth control should be a rallying cry for women everywhere in this election," Bellow said. "The stakes for women are too high for flip-flopping and too high to risk Republican control of the Senate. I will never check to see which way the winds of public opinion are blowing when it comes to women's reproductive freedom. I will stand up against Republicans in Washington to defend family planning without exception and do everything in my power to persuade my colleagues to support it."
"We need a U.S. Senator who will unequivocally fight for women's rights," said State Rep. Diane Russell (D-Portland). "Susan Collins only seems to stand with women in election years. If she really supported women, she would never have voted for the Blunt Amendment. She chose to vote with the extremists in her party when it mattered, and Maine women deserve better."
Bellows recently announced endorsements by the National Organization for Women PAC and Feminist Majority. She was a leader in the Maine Choice Coalition and the Coalition for Maine Women and worked to guarantee women's equal legal treatment as head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine from 2005 to 2013. She has been recognized for her work to advance women's health and reproductive choice with awards from the University of Maine Women's Studies Department, Mabel Wadsworth Women's Health Center, the American Association of University Women, the Frances Perkins Center and the Maine Democratic Party.
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