FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 14, 2016
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For the second time in two weeks, Senate Republicans put their dangerous response to Zika on the floor for a vote. The bill fails to protect women and the children they may wish to have by inserting funding restrictions on family planning. Just yesterday in a U.S. Senate hearing, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and USAID confirmed the need for women and men to have access to family planning information and services during this time—yet Senate Republicans refuse to follow their recommendation.
NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue released the following statement in response to Senate Republicans’ refusal to seriously respond to the Zika crisis:
“With this bill, anti-choice Republicans are yet again putting women’s lives—and the lives of children we may wish to have—in danger. Instead of digging deep to adequately respond to this global health threat, anti-choice Republicans are trying to restrict funding for the very clinics and health care that allow women to plan for healthy families. Their constant claim that they are dedicated to ‘protecting the unborn’ falls flat when they refuse to give women the resources we need to bear healthy children.
“Women are rightly concerned for their own health and their ability to bear healthy children in midst of the Zika crisis, and it’s appalling that anti-choice Republicans in Congress are skipping down for a seven week vacation before addressing this crisis in a comprehensive way. NARAL will continue working to expose this disgusting hypocrisy, because women and families deserve elected officials who put their best interests first.”
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