Murray Statement on One Year Since Dobbs Leak: Don't Forget It Was Republicans Who Ripped Away the Right to Abortion

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), senior member and former Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee, issued a statement on the one-year anniversary of the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

“One year ago today, women in America learned that the Supreme Court was planning to strip away their fundamental right to choose—the freedom women have enjoyed for half a century to make their own decisions about their bodies, their lives, and their futures.

“Make no mistake: Republicans’ goal has always been a national abortion ban. When we warned about the very real dangers of a Supreme Court stacked with far-right ideologues—they insisted Roe was ‘settled law.’ When we said they would try to pass a national abortion ban, we were called ‘alarmist.’ When we said they would pass laws that would force children to give birth, women to carry their rapists’ babies, and people to carry unviable pregnancies to term, we were told we had it wrong.

“Well, here we are, a year later, and all of this—and worse—has come true. In states across the country, women are suffering at the hands of extreme Republican legislators and their draconian laws that force women to stay pregnant no matter the circumstances, even when their lives are at risk. Doctors have fled states where they are badly needed and have been threatened with lawsuits and jail time just for providing lifesaving health care. And now, even safe medication abortion the FDA approved decades ago is under threat from far-right judges who seek to roll back the clock.

“On the anniversary of this cruel Supreme Court decision being leaked, don’t let anyone forget it was a meticulously planned, decades-long effort by Republicans that ripped away a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions and created a national health care crisis. Americans should be furious that our daughters have less rights than their mothers, and they have to make themselves heard with their voices and their votes at every possible opportunity. Senate Democrats will keep fighting back against Republicans who are trying to ban abortion in every single state, every way we can, until we can restore Roe and protect every woman’s right to abortion.”

Senator Murray has long been a leader in Congress in the fight to protect and expand access to reproductive health care and abortion rights, and since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she has led Congressional efforts to fight back. At a hearing she chaired right in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, Senator Murray warned of the chaos, confusion, and harm the decision and Republicans’ extreme policies would cause.

In the wake of the decision, Senator Murray pushed the administration to do everything in its power to protect patients and providers—and introduced and fought to pass commonsense legislation to protect the right to contraception, protect every American’s right to travel for abortion care, protect doctors’ right to provide legal abortion care, expand our national family planning program, protect the right to build a family through assisted reproductive technology, and more.

She led her colleagues at the very outset of this Congress to make crystal clear that Senate Democrats are continuing to fight to protect every American’s reproductive rights and will be a firewall against House Republicans’ continued attacks on our rights—and that’s exactly what she’s doing now. Senator Murray recently helped lead 48 of her colleagues in reintroducing the Women’s Health Protection Act to put an end to the chaos Republicans have caused and restore Roe nationwide.