Hillary Clinton before Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007 (Abortion)

January 24, 2008

Hillary Clinton before Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007 (Transcribed by Laura Echevarria)

Hillary Clinton:

How do I thank Cecile Richards for being the president of this great organization and committing herself to not only continuing and protecting the work that Planned Parenthood has done for so many years,but bringing these issues into the political debate. No one is better suited to do that than Cecile,and I’m so grateful to her for her leadership and her friendship.

Now, I don’t need to tell you what you already know–that Planned Parenthood is on the front lines. That, you are the ones who are running the clinics, who are conducting the educational programs. You’re often the ones who are the sole advocates for women and families in the areas that you come from and, sometimes, at great personal risk, you’re the ones who push through the crowds and the demonstrators to get to work in the morning.

And I am extremely grateful to you for that, because for, too many women, you are the only place to turn. And that sometimes gets lost in all of the political rhetoric–that this is not just about family planning, as critically important as that is—this is about prenatal care, this is about cancer screening, this is about many other critical health care services. And that’s what you do and that’s why we have to support you and thank you—thank you for your courage, thank you for your dedication, and thank you for your commitment to our Constitutional rights and your willingness to engage in the political process to defend them. I am so, so grateful to you.

Now, if we had time, everyone here could stand up, like Lora has, and explain what brought us to this room, at this time, on behalf of Planned Parenthood. You know, I was heavily influenced, of course, growing up, as all of us were in the 60s and 70s, but I also gained some very important insight when I was First Lady.

Some of you have heard me talk about this before, but it had such a profound impact on me because I was privileged to travel around the world on behalf of our country. I visited, I think, eighty-two countries. And everywhere I went, I tried to make time to meet with women, from small groups of women to large groups—to listen and learn about what life was like for them in their countries; what kinds of challenges did they confront and I had some of the most extraordinary experiences being able to, just for a few hours, enter into a different culture and have some sense of what life was like for women and girls everywhere and what we had in common that marked our experience anywhere.

I remember being in Romania and meeting with many different groups of women and, in particular, focusing on the horrible problem that they had in Romania at that time of so many children who had contracted the AIDS virus and either were infected or already very sick. And I visited a facility that was taking care of these AIDS orphans—because they had contracted AIDS in the orphanages they had been placed in shortly after their births.

Now why did that happen?

Well, in pre-Democratic Romania, the Communist leader Ceaucescu, declared that it was the duty of every woman to bear five children for the state. And in order to ensure that it happened women would be rounded up during the month at their work places and be forced to undergo physical examinations so that if they had been determined to be pregnant, the government police could follow and watch them. Many children were born during this time who were unwanted and abandoned in government-run orphanages, where they didn’t have enough to eat and where they couldn’t get proper medical care and one of the ways of trying to keep their health up—it was thought at the time—was through blood transfusions. And that’s how so many of these children became victims of their own government’s policies.

On the other hand, when I traveled to China, in 1995, to speak at the UN Women’s Conference on behalf of women’s rights, I thought it was absolutely essential that I speak out against the practice in China of one child for one family, because what that meant for women’s lives was often forced sterilization and forced abortion.

And from these two country’s experiences, I think it’s fair to draw a very important lesson for all of us. Whether it was Romania, where women’s bodies were considered the property of the state, and they were supposed to be contributing to the growth of the state, or China saying they could have only one child, government was dictating the most private decisions that women will ever be able to make and that should be made without government interference. And the results in both of those countries, as we know, were tragic.

Now we’ve certainly heard a lot of talk about freedom from President Bush in the last six and half years, ironically from someone who seems so intent on undermining it here at home. A president who set out on day one, determined to dismantle reproductive freedoms here in the United States and around the world. He reinstated the “Global Gag Rule,” he appointed a birth control opponent to serve as the family planning chief at the Department of Health and Human Services. He nominated not one but, unfortunately, two anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court. His Justice Department issued a 141-page protocol for the treatment of rape survivors that did not contain a single reference to emergency contraception as a potential option. And his own former Surgeon General just testified before a Congressional committee about how the administration censored his speeches and barred him from talking about contraceptives and forbid him from talking about his concerns about abstinence-only sex education.

So for six and a half years, the president has played politics with women’s health. He’s chipped away at reproductive rights and he’s worked to turn Washington, D.C. into an evidence-free zone where facts are subordinate to ideology and opinion. [applause]. And, of course, we know who’s paying the price for these policies–women around the world suffering because they no longer have access to reproductive care; women right here at home who want to plan their families and who want to prevent unintended pregnancies but no longer have access to contraception. Children sitting in classrooms receiving false, misleading, incomplete information that will not protect them from pregnancy and STDs. This is not just an affront to women’s rights—it is an affront to human rights, to our most fundamental values as a nation.

And I want you to know that when I’m president, I will devote my very first days in office to reversing these ideological, anti-science, anti-prevention policies that this administration has put into place [applause], starting with the “Global Gag Rule” and going from there, and I will not rest until we once again protect women’s health, honor families’ privacy, and restore our fundamental Constitutional freedoms.

Now the way I see it, this should not be a partisan battle. Anyone truly committed to reducing the need for abortions should be committed to doing whatever it takes to reducing unintended pregnancies—regardless of politics and regardless of ideology.

Now that is what we did, way back in the 1990s, when I helped to launch the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. We set an ambitious goal of reducing unintended pregnancies by one-third over the decade and, guess what? We achieved that goal. [applause]

And how did we do it? Well, we did it the old-fashioned way—we talked with people, we listened to people, we brought people together from many different communities and we focused on prevention.

Now that’s exactly what you and I have done together—we have focused on prevention. Working with you, I introduced the Prevention First Act, to expand family planning services to low-income women, require health insurance companies to cover contraception and provide funding for age-appropriate, medically accurate, comprehensive sex education. [applause]
And we learned a lot of lessons from doing this together. You know, when I introduced the Prevention First Act, I was sure that I could get Republican sponsors because that’s what we should all agree on, right? I have yet to get one Republican.

And so what we’ve done is to force the Republicans and their conservative allies to reveal their true agenda. They don’t just want to wage a war on choice, they want to wage a war on contraception. They are against family planning. In the 21st Century, they want to prevent women from having access to the tools they should have to determine their own reproductive futures.

And I think it’s important to continue pointing that out. We cannot let them hide behind their positions without making it clear what their real agenda is. [applause] Because the fact is, today, the United States has one of the highest unintended pregnancy rates in the industrialized world. Half of all pregnancies are unintended and nearly half of those end in abortions.

Yet this administration and their Republicans allies in the Congress, has refused to provide adequate funding for Title Ten. You know how important Title Ten is—you’re out there every single day working with it. That is the program that provides critical family planning services for so many low- income women. Now we increased Title Ten funding by fifty-eight percent when my husband was in office. President Bush hasn’t recommended a single increase in any of the seven budgets he has submitted. And the administration’s allies in Congress certainly haven’t made your jobs any easier with their burdensome new Medicaid documentation requirements.

Each day you provide critical basic health services often to people who have no where else to turn and these new requirements are intended to make your work more difficult. Since they’ve gone into effect, many people who are in need, who are perfectly eligible for Medicaid, have been denied benefits and many more have been deterred from even applying. Many are going without services for weeks or months. Now that’s enough time, sadly, for a contraception client to become an abortion client, enough time for a minor health problem, left untreated, to develop into a full-blown emergency room crisis.

Today, we have a two-tiered system in our country. According to a report by the non-partisan Guttmacher Institute, high- income women have a quick, convenient access to contraceptives. Low-income women don’t. And today, poor women are four-times more likely to experience an unplanned pregnancy than women with higher incomes.

But it’s like these women are invisible to the president and his allies—they don’t even see the women that you see every single day. Well these women and their health needs—their rights—are not invisible to me and I know that they’re not invisible to you. And when we take back the White House, they will not be invisible to the President of the United States any longer. [applause]

Now, one thing I know we agree on is that your health care and your Constitutional freedoms shouldn’t depend on the size of your income. And when I’m president, we’re going to increase funding for Title Ten again. We’re going to end the excessive paperwork and bureaucracy and make it easier, not harder, for women across the country get the health care they need. We’re also going to end insurance company discrimination once and for all. I am very proud that in New York state contraceptive equity is now the law.

My Prevention First Act would make it the law across America, because it is outrageous that during our reproductive years women continue to pay sixty-eight percent more for their health care than men.

Now we have our work cut out for us to make sure we get all of this done. That’s why your voting campaign is absolutely essential.

We also have our work cut out for us to expand access to emergency contraception. Now we together have been on a long road to Plan B. You might remember, we’ve had not one but two successive political appointees to be FDA commissioner who blocked Plan B from being sold over the counter. They overruled not only FDA’s own medical experts but the recommendations of more than 70 organizations including the American Medical Association.

Now in the end, Senator Patty Murray and I had to stop them not once but twice. We had to put a hold on one nomination and then they told us that they would make a decision, so we said alright we will lift our hold. And then they came out, as some of you will recall, and said, “Our decision is to decide we’re not deciding.”

So then when they nominated another FDA commissioner, Patty and I said, “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on us.” We’re not letting anybody get confirmed until you promise to approve over-the-counter Plan B. Now since it’s been approved for over the counter use, sales have doubled. That means fewer unintended pregnancies and fewer abortions.

The challenge now is to make sure that drugstores and medical facilities actually carry Plan B so that no matter where a woman lives she can obtain it. Now I’ve already sponsored legislation called the Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act that would require all hospitals in our country to provide emergency contraception to rape survivors and, today, I’m introducing legislation to expand access to women serving in our armed forces here in America and around the world.

It’s called the Compassionate Care for Servicewomen Act and it guarantees that emergency contraception will be available at all military health care facilities. Right now these facilities are not required to stock emergency contraception and many of them don’t, leaving many of our servicewomen with nowhere to turn in the event of an emergency. That is absolutely unacceptable. Everyday, these women put our country’s uniform on and go out and risk their lives for our freedom and our values. Ensuring that they can exercise their freedoms is the very least we can do. [applause]

But standing up for contraception is only half the battle, because this administration hasn’t just taken on contraception and choice, they’ve also waged an all-out war on comprehensive sex education. More than one billion dollars has been spent on abstinence only programs—programs that don’t just withhold critical information but actually spread disinformation on everything from the effectiveness of contraception to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases to the effects of abortion. The results are unsurprising.

A recent study by Mathematica shows that students who take part in these programs are no more likely to use contraception, delay having sex, or have fewer partners than students in a control group. That is not, to put it mildly, a good use of one billion dollars. And it’s certainly is not what America stands for. We are not a country that spreads false information to its citizens—especially our young people–with taxpayer dollars. [applause]

When I am president we will get back to supporting comprehensive, evidenced-based sex education programs. That is what we used in the National Campaign against teen pregnancy. We talked common sense, we used evidence and argumentation, not ideology and opinion—and it worked. And I think that our young people deserve nothing less. They deserve programs based on sound science, not ideology, that equip them to make safe, healthy choices for themselves. That is the America that we want for our children.

Now, finally, when I am president, we will stand up for choice and nominate judges to our court who protect and preserve our Constitutional rights. [applause] For six and a half years, President Bush has appointed one ideological, anti-choice judge after another—Judges Pryor and Owen to the, in the circuit courts, to Justices Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court.

Now when I voted against both Justice Roberts and Justice Alito [applause], I made statements that expressed my fear that they would use their seats on the Court to undermine Roe. I hoped that I was wrong; I’m sorry to see that I was right. With Justices Roberts and Alito, the Court handed down Gonzales versus Carhart. And with that one decision, five justices dismissed four decades of precedent protecting women’s health—basically denying medical decision making and undermining the right to choose.

So let me be clear, when I am president, I will appoint judges to our courts who understand the role of precedent. That it actually does mean something. And also the importance of Roe v. Wade–that it truly is the touchstone of reproductive freedom and the embodiment of our most fundamental rights. That no one—no judge, no governor, no senator, no president –has the right to take away.

Now I have been an advocate for children and families and women longer than some of you have been alive, and I am proud that we have made so much progress together. I am committed to doing the work that I know is important in the lives of the women whom I have represented as a legal aid lawyer, the women I have gone to bat for when it came to improving living conditions in Arkansas, now in New York, the women whose voices too often just get lost in the political debate and all of the partisanship that infects this town. And one thing that I know is that we should trust women to make good decisions for themselves. [applause]

With good information, good education, and good healthcare we can empower women and girls. So I’m very proud of my one hundred percent voting record with Planned Parenthood. [applause] And I’m very, I’m very proud of our partnership, of working together over so many years on behalf of reproductive freedom and health care and fundamental Constitutional rights and values.

And I want you to know that, if you give me the honor of serving as your president, you will once again have a partner in the White House and together we will work toward a time when we make evidenced-based decisions again, when every woman and every American has access to health care and education, and when every child, in this country and around the world, is wanted, cherished, and loved. Thank you all very, very much.

[Questions from three PP leaders: First, from the CEO of Metro DC on what Clinton would do, if elected president, to redirect abstinence funding into PPFA coffers or, to use the questioner’s words, getting money back from “ignorance-only” education.]

Well, that sounds like a platform to me. Well, I think that we do have to get back to not only including issues related to reproductive health in any debate about health care reform and that includes making insurance companies and government programs value the importance of this kind of health care and provide the resources to actually do it. But it also means changing our laws and changing the attitudes here in Washington so that you can do the job that you try to do and that you do so well.

We have a problem right now because of the effects of something called the Deficit Reduction Act last year that has made it very difficult for a lot of Planned Parenthood providers, university clinics, and others to get access to, you know, lower cost contraceptives and we have to fix that and we also have to put more money into Title Ten. We do have to, as I said in my speech, get back to comprehensive sex education.

And I have also introduced legislation that I think will help in the short run, the Unintended Pregnancy Reduction Act, which would strengthen Medicaid’s coverage for prenatal care and family-planning services, by classifying and ensuring that Medicaid coverage for family planning services is explicitly supported. So we have to very specific about this. We cannot leave anything to the imagination, because we know what happens if there are any loopholes that people can run through.

And last summer, another study showed that if we had continued on the course we were on in 2001, and if the Bush Administration and their allies in Congress hadn’t made such an abrupt reversal of the policies that were underway, we would have had probably 500,000 more low-income women having access to contraceptives around the country and we would have avoided a lot of the pain and the cost and the anguish associated with medical care once a pregnancy has started. So I think that there’s a lot that we can do and we will do but first we have to sound the alarm which is why I tried to make it very clear in my remarks that the opponents of family planning are not just opposing abortion—they are opposing contraception and they are opposing women’s rights.

So if we can make that clear, I think we’ll have a much stronger case to when it comes to doing everything we need to do to get the resources to Planned Parenthood and others who actually take care of the people who have no where else to turn.

[Second question from Sarah Noble, an activist from Wisconsin, asked how Clinton would choose justices for the Supreme Court to protect Roe v. Wade.]

Well Sarah, I think it’s such an important issue for all of us. Because up until relatively recently, the composition of courts has been an issue the other side has used but we haven’t. You know, you think about it, all of the campaigns that we’re running against courts—liberal judges and all the rest of that—I’m old enough to remember billboards and other things that really were politically motivated and focused on trying to make the courts a political issue.

And I think that’s necessarily a good thing to do—I think the courts should be independent and not be political footballs, but that is certainly not what the president has done with the courts by appointing people who had a political agenda to pursue, oftentimes, frankly, people who were not very well qualified. I used to say all the time, there are a lot of qualified Republican lawyers and judges in America, why doesn’t the president choose one of them?

Unfortunately, the people who were chosen were chosen for the purpose you have described: to pursue a political agenda, specifically but not exclusively, because, remember, they also have economic issues that they’re pushing and other matters that are important to them. But certainly, at the top of the list was this effort to try to overturn Roe v. Wade, or chip away at it as much as possible. And I will appoint judges who I think value precedent who understand the importance the Constitution gives to individual freedom.

You know, the complaint’s often about Roe v. Wade is that it that privacy does not appear in the Constitution, well that’s because it’s assumed in everything that the Constitution stands for. I mean, how can you have freedom of speech and freedom of conscience if you don’t have a right to privacy? So I will appoint well-qualified judges who really respect the Constitution and see it as the living document–which it is–that has given us the core of our values and our freedoms for 225 years now.

[Last question, Dewayne Weaver from Metro DC, with the teens in attendance, asked the last question about preventing STDs and AIDS among teens through sex-ed in schools.]

Thank you so much Dewayne and thank to all the teen advocates who are here. You know, Dewayne makes a really important point. If we look at what is really happening with sexually transmitted diseases, not only with HIV and AIDS but other diseases as well, it is tragic that we have not maintained our public awareness and our outreach and our educational efforts, but that instead we have substituted an inadequate, inaccurate effort that as we said before has received a billion dollars. Meanwhile the rate of HIV/AIDS here in the nation’s capital is ten times the national average. The leading cause of death for young African-American women is AIDS, and I think it is the height of indifference and negligence not to have your government provide accurate, complete information so that people can make better decisions for themselves.

And it also affects other people, because sexually transmitted diseases are sexually transmitted, and if we don’t have a real understanding of how we’re going to begin to stem that tide, we going to pay a very big price. You know, it is, for me, just a matter of conscience that we will get back to providing accurate, medically appropriate, age appropriate information. And it can’t happen too soon, because all the studies show that, despite the people’s claims about abstinence-only, it’s not working. And—abstinence has a role, and I absolutely believe that and I think people have a real right in our country to make the case on values and responsibility. But that alone is not an adequate or accurate message.

So I hope Dewayne, that even before I’m president, that in this Congress, now that we have a Democratic majority again we can begin to try to get back to comprehensive sex education. And I will do everything I can as a senator from New York and I will certainly do everything I can as your president to make that happen. Thank you all very much.

Posted in Abortion, Hillary Clinton, Planned Parenthood