Katie Britt (27:39)
And Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama, has become a good friend. She's been a guest on this podcast. She stood up at one lunch, and she gave an impassioned speech to the other Republican senators about how important IVF was and how she was hearing from women and men, although mostly women, but parents, and would be parents across Alabama who were incredibly concerned IVF was in jeopardy. And she said, we've got to protect, protect that. I listened to what she said, and so I went to her and approached her and said, listen, you support ivf, I support ivf. Let's draft legislation that puts a clear, unequivocal protection into federal statutory law to make clear that no state and no local government can ban ivf. Let's find common ground. She agreed. I drafted the legislation. We did it together, we filed it. Now the Democrats want a fear monger on ivf. So there's a different bill that they call an IVF bill that is introduced by Tammy Duckworth, the very liberal Democrat from Illinois. The Tammy Duckworth, quote, IVF bill is not an IVF bill. It's a radical abortion bill. It would give the Secretary of HHS Health and Human Services broad authority to, under that bill, protect abortion in a vast variety of circumstances. Also, the Duckworth bill explicitly overturns the protections of religious liberty under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I support ivf, but I certainly don't want to force a physician to participate in IVF if it's against their religious faith. It's not against my religious faith, but if it's against theirs, I respect everyone's religious liberty to decide, okay, I don't want to personally participate in it. And yet the Democrats, they do want to force someone to. To potentially violate their own religious faith to participate in something that they have moral concerns about. And so yesterday, Chuck Schumer teed up a vote, it's the second time in a couple of months on the Tammy Duckworth bill. Now, the reason he teed up the vote is because he knew it would fail. And it was written in such a way as to be filled with poison pills as to force any Republican with principles who believes in life to vote against it. Because this would empower a Joe Biden or Kamala Harris administration to go after laws protecting unborn children in states across this country. This was an abortion bill. It was not an IVF bill. And it was again designed to trample religious liberty. So yesterday on the Senate floor, I went to the Senate floor along with Katie Britton. We tried to pass our IVF bill. And I stood up and gave a speech in support of it. Katie Britt stood up and gave a speech in support of it. And I asked for unanimous consent to pass our bill. And what happened? The Democrats stood up and objected. They said, no, we will not allow this to pass. And we had a debate back and forth. And I want to encourage you, if you care about this issue, Go listen to the debate, listen to my speech, listen to Katie Britt's speech, and then listen to Patty Murray, the Democrat from Washington state who objected because the entire point of what the Democrats were doing was a purely political exercise. If they actually wanted to protect ivf, all they had to do was very simple, not say two words, not say the words. I object. If they had not said those two words today, the Senate would have unanimously passed my legislation protecting ivf. But from the Democrats perspective, that would have been a catastrophic disaster because if we actually pass a strong statutory protection for ivf, then they can't run millions of dollars of campaign ads scaring voters into saying the mean Republicans want to take away ivf. So they objected to Katie Brits in my legislation because they don't want to protect ivf. And a point that I made in the debate. I said, listen, the Democrat bill was drafted deliberately with poison pills, their objective. They wanted to Republicans to vote no because they don't actually want to pass their bill. What they want to do is force Republicans to vote no so they can run ads saying, oh, Republicans are opposed to ivf. That is a lie. Not a single Republican is opposed to ivf. A couple of months ago when we had this debate, one of the people who joined Katie and me on the Senate floor was Roger Marshall. Roger Marshall, Republican senator from Kansas, is a physician. He's an OB GYN who has delivered thousands of babies, and he actually has performed IVF procedures for hundreds of parents. He literally was an IVF doctor. And yet the Democrats talking point is an IVF doctor is opposed to ivf. It's absurd. So understand, they drafted their bill with poison pills because their objective was to make Republicans vote against it. And all but two of us did. My bill and Katie's bill has no poison pills in it. Every Democrat agrees with every word of our bill. There's not a word in it that they disagree with. Their problem is if it passes, the issue they want to run against goes away and they don't want the issue to go away. And so sadly, they objected. And I got to tell you, this is an example of where the corrupt corporate media matters. When I was giving my speech, when Katie was giving her speech, there were no reporters in the gallery. If you read any of the press coverage, the reporters all said the headlines today were Republicans block bill to protect ivf. And you know what? The corporate media, virtually none of them covered the fact that we had a bill to protect ivf. The Democrats blocked part of the reason the Democrats are willing to do that is they know the media will not cover what they're doing.
