Shaheen Urges Colleagues to Pass the Right to Contraception Act to Protect Women’s Access to Contraception

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) took to the Senate floor to urge her Republican colleagues to support the Right to Contraception Act to protect women’s access to contraception. Ahead of the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, which rolled back reproductive rights for women across the country, the Senator spoke about the need to codify the fundamental right to contraception, as recognized by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut more than half a century ago. Enshrining the right to contraception into federal law would reverse steps already taken by Republicans in states across the country to restrict access to contraceptives and ensure that any future attempt by the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold would not endanger access to this essential health care. Senator Shaheen’s remarks can be viewed here.

Key quotes from Senator Shaheen: 

• “We’ve heard people suggest that out concern about access to contraception is really a scare tactic. But for all of us who worked for years trying to protect Roe v. Wade and the right for women to make our own health care decisions, we heard that same argument for decades on the Roe decision… ‘the Supreme Court is never going to overturn that. We’ve already heard the Justices say that’s settled law.’ Well, we saw what happened in the Dobbs decision.” 
• “These threats against women are felt acutely in my home state of New Hampshire, where our critical family planning providers can’t make ends meet because elected officials continue to block federal and state funding vital to ensuring Granite Staters have access to reproductive care.” 
• “By throwing up roadblock after roadblock, MAGA Republicans are showing they don’t really care about women’s health or our personal freedoms. They are taking us backwards when women want and deserve to go forward. And these efforts follow a concerning pattern – that women’s rights are negotiable, that they can easily be taken away and that women’s lives and our freedoms to decide our own futures are not valued.”  
• “As we vote today, history is watching us. We can’t sit back and watch while reproductive freedoms backslide. Because access to contraception is a fundamental right and no one—not a sitting Supreme Court Justice, not a governor, not a member of Congress—should be allowed to decide whether or not a woman chooses to use contraception and determine her own future.”

Below is a full transcript of Shaheen’s remarks as delivered.

Madam President, I am here today with the same concern that we’ve heard from my colleagues, that this country is failing women in New Hampshire and across the country when it comes to protecting our fundamental freedoms. 

Fundamental freedoms like the right to contraception, which we thought was safe just a few short years ago. 

From the beginning, the right to full access to contraception was hard-fought.

Since that right was first recognized by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut nearly 60 years ago, to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of contraceptive coverage in 2010 requiring insurance companies to pay for it, there have been incremental, yet vital, steps forward for women to determine our own reproductive futures. 

It put us on a path to making sure our daughters and granddaughters had more fundamental rights, not fewer.  

But as so many things, this progress has been met with resistance. In the years since the Affordable Care Act, attacks on contraception have increased at both the state and federal level. 

Like many Americans, like those of us here today, I was very alarmed when Justice Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling that the Court should “reconsider” its ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut. “Reconsider” women’s rights to access to contraception. That’s my editorial analysis of what Justice Thomas was saying. 

And then of course just last month, the former president, Donald Trump, implied that states should be allowed to decide access to contraception, potentially setting a dangerous precedent that would harm millions of women and families who rely on contraception. 

And we heard Senator Murray talk so eloquently about how the laws are being interpreted to raise concerns about access to contraception. And as Senator Schatz said so well. We’ve heard people suggest that out concern about access to contraception is really a scare tactic. 

But for all of us who worked for years trying to protect Roe v. Wade and the right for women to make our own health care decisions, we heard that same argument for decades on the Roe decision, “the Supreme Court is never going to overturn that. We’ve already heard the Justices say that’s settled law.” 

Well, we saw what happened in the Dobbs decision. 

And these threats against women are felt acutely in my home state of New Hampshire, where our critical family planning providers can’t make ends meet because elected officials continue to block federal and state funding vital to ensuring Granite Staters have access to reproductive care. 

And that care does not just encompass contraceptive services, though that’s critically important, but it also includes basic reproductive education, includes things breast cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease screening and treatment. 

By throwing up roadblock after roadblock, MAGA Republicans are showing they don’t really care about women’s health or our personal freedoms. 

They are taking us backwards when women want and deserve to go forward.

And these efforts follow a concerning pattern – that women’s rights are negotiable, that they can easily be taken away and that women’s lives and our freedoms to decide our own futures are not valued.

So, to address the women and families who are on the front lines of this partisan onslaught, let me just say that I understand the anxiety, the fear and the hopelessness that comes from watching your rights be stripped away. 

To Zoe, a recent University of New Hampshire graduate. She wrote so powerfully about the positive experience she had with a family planning provider in New Hampshire. 

She said, and I quote, “without access to birth control, decisions about my future would always have an element of uncertainty lingering.”  

But because Zoe had access to a family planning provider, she was empowered to make her own decisions and to have control over her own future.

And to the women in New Hampshire who have written to me to say, for example: 

“I’m worried about which rights will be taken away.” 

“I feel that women don’t have equal rights.”

And “how did it come to this?”

To the women not ready to start a family… to those whose family is just the right size… and to all of the young women, like my granddaughters, who have fewer freedoms now than their mothers did at their age… I say to you - I hear you and I feel that pain.

As we vote today, history is watching us.

We can’t sit back and watch while reproductive freedoms backslide.  

Because access to contraception is a fundamental right and no one—not a sitting Supreme Court Justice, not a governor, not a member of Congress—should be allowed to decide whether or not a woman chooses to use contraception and determine her own future.

That highly important and deeply personal decision belongs to the woman, and to the woman and her family, and to the woman alone.

With that, I yield the floor.

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