Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here, especially after the hearing we had in the Constitution Subcommittee yesterday.

The title was, I kid you not, "The Myths and Scope of Roe v. Wade."

Myths? It took us a little digging to find out what the hearing was about, but apparently no one knows what Roe actually said, the right to privacy is a myth, the strong pro-choice majority is a myth, and women are never helped and only hurt by access to safe legal abortion.

One witness seemed to suggest that because we now have the Internet, even if Roe were overturned – G-d forbid! – there would be no back-alley abortions. We never got an explanation on that one, but I was not reassured.
It went downhill from there.

The good news is that there was no crazy legislation pending. The bad news is that the last really crazy legislation Congress passed is about to go before the new Supreme Court. That legislation is our old friend the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act – brought to you by the same members of Congress who diagnosed Terry Schiavo from an old video tapes.

I don’t need to tell you about your own case. The Center continues to play a leading role in the preservation of the fundamental rights to privacy, self-determination, and choice. Your work, day after day, helps to protect the rights of those women who do not get a fair hearing – indeed any hearing – in today’s Washington.

Your work and your skill is needed more than ever, both in the United States and around the world. All the pseudoscience and crackpot legal theories need to be answered by skilled advocates, accurate information, and energetic, committed people who are willing to fight the good fight day after day.

Your work is paying off. The victories in the lower courts in Carhart v. Gonzalez, and its companion cases, demonstrate that we were right in asserting that the Partial Birth bill violated the Supreme Court’s explicit explication of the law, and what Congress needed to do if it really wanted to enact federal legislation that would, for the first time, ban safe, legal abortion procedures.

The Congress out of arrogance and, I continue to believe, a legal strategy based entirely on the anticipated retirement of Justice O’Connor, willfully ignored the law and enacted facially unconstitutional legislation.

I don’t think that it was so much incompetence as a desire to push back further the protections set down in Roe. It is a strategy outlined in now-Justice Alito’s Reagan era memo. With him on the Court, and with the Court’s dangerous departure from the core principles in Roe, the "undue burden" standard could easily be used to eliminate the right to choose for the vast majority of American women – to the detriment of their lives, their health, their families and, I strongly believe, our communities.

Will this new Court simply go along never finding any burden, no matter how outrageous, to be undue? I hope not, but I fear so.

What has been a simmering effort to test the limits of the new standard has boiled over in places like South Dakota, with legislation that would not allow a woman to terminate a pregnancy even if it was necessary to protect her health.

How much of a threat to her health short of death is tolerable to these people? Sterility? Stroke? A less than 50% chance of death?

Clearly, their loathing of any provision for a woman’s mental health, is reflected in their rhetoric and their legislation. What is lost in that debate is the notion that an exception for rape or incest can only be justified on the basis of protecting a woman’s mental well-being. What some of my colleagues deride as a "loophole' is really simple humanity. That seems to be in short supply in Washington and, sadly, in many state capitols.

The danger is too great. We can no longer depend on the Supreme Court to protect women’s fundamental rights. We can no longer depend on public officials who, while holding themselves out as "pro-choice" have never met an abortion restriction they don’t like.

I will soon be reintroducing, with Senator Barbara Boxer, the Freedom of Choice Act, which would codify Roe v. Wade as it was originally set out, not in the much watered-down and weakened form we have today.

I am under no illusions that it would be given so much as a hearing in the current regime, but it is nonetheless important to force members to go on record: are you or are you not in favor of protecting women’s rights, their health, and their families? It’s really a yes or no question.

For many years those of us involved in these battles have warned that a right not staunchly and consistently defended is in great peril. Apathy, and a mis-placed faith in the courts, has brought us to this point. We must act. This is the moment we have long warned would come.

In that struggle, the Center’s skill and dedication will be absolutely indispensable. It will not be easy, but we cannot avoid it. I look forward to working with all of you to protect the rights of women to happy, healthy lives in which they are accorded the minimum respect that is due to every person. We cannot afford to fail.

Thank you.