'It's Devastating': Peter Welch Hammers Supreme Court After Decision To Overturn Roe V. Wade
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) spoke about abortion rights in America.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Let me turn to Senator Welch.
00:02Thank you very much.
00:03You know, I want to thank the witnesses.
00:05I'm just amazed at what you had to go through.
00:10I think it's devastating that the Supreme Court stripped women of a constitutional right.
00:17I can't remember a court that has been so bad since the Dred Scott decision by Roger Taney.
00:27Roe allowed people to make their own decisions, and people have a different point of view on this.
00:34Dr. Scott, I take it that you are opposed to abortion.
00:39Yes, it's a human life, and I support human life.
00:44Right, and I respect your right to advocate for that position, but when we had Roe, that could be your position.
00:55But Ms. Miller, who had to make a real-world decision about her own life, and probably more importantly, your viable son, had a right to make her decision.
01:09You laid out, when I was listening to your presentation, a point of view that the laws that have been passed in these states that are to your liking, I take it, don't cause doctors to hesitate, that don't create travel burdens on folks who are pregnant.
01:35That's certainly not the evidence that I'm familiar with, and I can only imagine what it was like for you, Ms. Miller, to be sitting here hearing that when your very recent life experience was totally the opposite.
01:51You couldn't even get basic medical information because providers you trusted and relied on felt they could be on the wrong side of the law.
02:01Is that pretty much it?
02:04That's correct, and we would end up in these conversations where they were apologizing to us for not giving more information, and we were apologizing for even asking.
02:14The other thing, Dr. Skouf, that you mentioned was that there are a lot of services for folks who may have wanted to terminate a pregnancy but gave birth, and there would be services for housing and so on.
02:31That's not my experience, and frankly, I have a somewhat cynical point of view about some of that advocacy because it's not real, and it's as though the folks who are promoting that are committed to providing protection from conception to birth, but after that, you're on your own.
02:53The state of Vermont is very proud of our medical center, and Vermont has not restricted the right to access to abortion. In fact, it has protected it in our Constitution so women can make their own decision, but we're seeing in our own health center increasing applications,
03:17and what I'm told is that the reason for increasing medical applications is that physicians, there would be physicians and nurses, do not feel that they will be hamstrung from being able to give the best advice to their patients.
03:32I'll ask you, sir, if that's consistent with the statistics that you found.
03:38Yeah, absolutely. I think that in general, access to abortion care and finding providers that patients can access has always been very difficult in the U.S., and now when there are states with bans, that access has gotten a lot worse.
04:00It's no surprise that providers want to practice in states where they can provide the best care possible, and patients on their side are forced to travel very far in order to access that care.
04:12In Texas, you mentioned the bounties. They have a law where if they report that you got in your car and went across state lines to get an abortion, what do they get?
04:28I believe it's $10,000 that somebody could basically win for hunting us down, and that would be for my husband, really.
04:39So him helping me through the airport, him helping me to find this information, my husband shouldn't go to jail for trying to save my life and make sure that there is still a mother to our son who was already present, our toddler, or that we could even bring our healthy, viable twin into the world.
05:00Well, thank you very much.
05:02My view here is that quite to the dismay, maybe even of the Supreme Court, by turning this back to the states, it created confusion, doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, and a lot of suffering, where we had under row the right of folks who were pro-life using their term and pro-choice using another term.
05:26They could each make their own decision, but one side couldn't make the decision for the other.
05:31And it's, I think, a grievous miscarriage of justice by the United States Supreme Court that they overturned Roe.
05:39Thank you. I yield back.