I believe reproductive freedom is deeply personal and should be a protected right. Women and their loved ones should not have this fundamental freedom subjected to the whim of politicians who happen to be in office or courts that do not honor a woman’s right to make decisions about her family. Women’s freedom should be permanent, not put at risk with each election cycle.
I oppose legislation that limits in-vitro fertilization (IVF). This important family planning right provides California families the gift of more than 11,500 pregnancies each year. We must protect this freedom.
I also support a woman’s right to choose whether an abortion is in her best interest. Since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade and took away the freedom of women to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions that they had held for generations, we must pass legislation restoring Roe v. Wade into law at the federal level. With the new IVF ruling in Alabama, we see clearly that what’s at risk is more than abortion rights. It’s about a woman’s right to make an informed decision about her own health.
Overturning Roe v Wade opened the floodgates for the far right to pass whatever measures they can to take away the right to an abortion or other family planning measures, like IVF.
We didn’t get here by accident. This was a coordinated, well-funded, decades-long effort by anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights politicians. My opponent Ken Calvert has been part of this attack for 30 years: he supported the court’s overturn of Roe, believes rapists should be able to sue doctors who provide abortions to victims of incest, and voted against bipartisan legislation to make it illegal to barricade abortion clinics.
This attack on reproductive rights will not end with the Supreme Court’s decision. We have already seen this. We must work together to protect everyone’s freedom to control their own bodies:
- We must pass the Women’s Health Protection Act into law to restore the Roe v. Wade protections that guarantee women the freedom to make their own decisions about their own bodies.
- The federal government must ensure access to medication abortion, the most common method of abortion, and which already has FDA approval.
- The FDA must take immediate steps to loosen constraints on medication abortion that experts already agree are unnecessary.
- The Department of Justice must protect the rights of people who travel across states to access abortions, ensuring they are not criminally prosecuted upon returning to home states where services are prohibited.
- We must pass legislation protecting the right to birth control.
- We must ensure that anti-IVF legislation – currently in place in one state – does not become national law.
