California Rep. Jackie Speier said Tuesday that women are being portrayed as property in states that have passed legislation restricting abortions and argued that government should be excluded from womens’ health decisions.
“I think that women are being depicted as chattel,” Speier said in an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day” when asked about state bills that would limit abortion procedures.
“The government has no right in my uterus, has no right in my vagina,” the California Democrat said.
Several Republican-led states have moved to pass bills restricting abortion, including Alabama, which enacted the country’s most restrictive abortion law last week, with the hopes of them being used as a vehicle to challenge the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.
“This has gotten quite absurd, and I think Alabama is just one more example of the many states that have now passed laws to treat women as if they do not have control over their bodies,” Speier told CNN.
Speier argued, “if we are going to start regulating women and their reproductive health, well maybe we should start regulating men and their reproductive health.”
Speier last week joined a number of women on social media in sharing their personal stories about abortion, saying that she underwent the procedure because it was the “best choice for my health (and) my family.”
“While it was an immensely hard decision, I don’t regret it,” she wrote on Twitter.
Speier first revealed in February 2011 during a speech on the House floor that she had suffered a miscarriage at 15 weeks and made the “painful” decision to have a dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure in her second trimester.
Her speech was in opposition to an amendment Mike Pence, then a member of Congress, sponsored that cut funding for Planned Parenthood.
“It was a painful process and it was, you know, incumbent on me to do it at that time,” Speier recalled during her interview with CNN Tuesday. “The fetus was not going to survive outside of the womb. I was particularly unnerved by my colleagues, Republican men, who had never endured that experience, to talk about it in such a cavalier way, to some how suggest that this is something you do just without any thought.”