Ranking Member DeGette's Floor Remarks on the "Conscience Protection Act"

Oversight and Investigations Subcomittee Ranking Member Diana DeGette (D-CO) delivered the following remarks on the House Floor during consideration of the so-called "Conscience Protection Act":

Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose the Conscience Protection Act, the latest in a long line of attacks on women’s health to come before this Congress.

This bill would strip away patient protections and give employers and health care companies the right to override a woman’s reproductive health decisions.

And it feeds into the ongoing effort to create more hurdles for women seeking medical procedures that are not only legal, but constitutionally protected.

Existing so-called “conscience provisions” are bad enough. Expanding them is not only wrong, it’s downright dangerous. Such interference threatens women’s ability to get accurate information about treatment options and can lead to their being deprived of timely emergency care.

There’s already plenty of evidence that current conscience provisions jeopardize women’s health and safety. They create confusion about whether health care providers are required to offer critical care in emergency situations.

I’ve heard some of the stories of what can result, and they are heart-wrenching.

Tamesha Means of Muskegon, Michigan was only 18 weeks pregnant when her water broke. The nearest hospital, Mercy Health Partners, didn’t pursue the normal course of treatment – inducing labor for a pregnancy that wasn’t viable in order to avoid risky complications. Instead, they gave her painkillers and sent her home. Over the next two days, Tamesha returned to the hospital twice, bleeding and in severe pain, running a high fever, only to get more or less the same response. They were completing the papers to send her home a third time when she started to deliver -- a very premature infant, dead within hours.

Mr. Speaker, we would likely see more such needless suffering and endangerment if the bill before us were to pass. It would let employers that sponsor health plans deny their female employees access to medical services to which the employer objects. It would reinforce existing provisions that let health providers opt out of providing such services or even information about them.

With all this in mind, I strongly urge my colleagues to oppose the Conscience Protection Act. Every patient should be able to make meaningful and fully informed decisions about their health care. Congress should stop interfering in women’s health decisions once and for all.

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