Sandra Fluke testimony entered in Congressional Record by Senator Barbara Boxer
Sandra Fluke testimony entered in Congressional Record by Senator Barbara Boxer
HON. BARBARA BOXER
OF CALIFORNIA
IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE
February 29, 2012
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the
Record the testimony of a woman who tried very hard to be allowed to
speak with a panel of men at a congressional hearing.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
[From the Law Students for Reproductive Justice Chapter]
Testimony From Law Student Barred From House Hearing
Members of Congress, good morning, and thank you for
allowing me to testify. My name is Sandra Fluke, and I'm a
third year student at Georgetown Law, a Jesuit school. I'm
also a past president of Georgetown Law Students for
Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. I'd like to acknowledge my
fellow LSRJ members and allies and thank them for being here
today.
Georgetown LSRJ is here today because we're so grateful
that this regulation implements the nonpartisan, medical
advice of the Institute of Medicine. I attend a Jesuit law
school that does not provide contraception coverage in
student health plans. Just as we students have faced
financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result,
employees at religiously affiliated hospitals and
universities across the country have suffered similar
burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will
meet the critical health care needs of so many women.
Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses
any potential conflict with the religious identity of
Catholic and Jesuit institutions.
As I have watched national media coverage of this debate,
it has been heartbreaking to see women's health treated as a
political football. When I turn off the TV and look around my
campus, I instead see the faces of the women affected, and I
have heard more and more of their stories. You see,
Georgetown does not cover contraceptives in its student
insurance, although it does cover contraceptives for faculty
and staff. On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman
who has suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens
because of this lack of contraceptive coverage. And so, I am
here to share their voices and ask that you hear them.
Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman
over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who,
like me, are on public interest scholarships, that's
practically an entire summer's salary. Forty percent of
female students at Georgetown Law report struggling
financially as a result of this policy. One told us of how
embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at
the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that
contraception wasn't covered, and had to walk away because
she couldn't afford it. Students like her have no choice but
to go without contraception. Just on Tuesday, a married
female student told me she had to stop using contraception
because she couldn't afford it any longer.
You might respond that contraception is accessible in lots
of other ways. Unfortunately, that's not true. Women's health
clinics provide vital medical services, but as the Guttmacher
Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the
crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing and
women are being forced to go without. How can Congress
consider allowing even more employers and institutions to
refuse contraceptive coverage and then respond that the non-
profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting
medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are
attempting to defund those very same clinics?
These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people.
In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other
medical reasons suffer dire consequences. A friend of mine,
for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take
prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her
ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by
Georgetown insurance because it's not intended to prevent
pregnancy. At many schools, it wouldn't be, and under Senator
Blunt's amendment, Senator Rubio's bill, or Representative
Fortenberry's bill, there's no requirement that an exception
be made for such medical needs. When they do exist, these
exceptions don't accomplish their well-intended goals because
when you let university administrators or other employers,
rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical
needs are good enough and whose aren't, a woman's health
takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her
body.
In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were
interrogated by insurance representatives and university
medical staff about why they need these prescriptions and
whether they're lying about their symptoms. For my friend,
and 20% of women in her situation, she never got the
insurance company to cover her prescription, despite
verification of her illness from her doctor. Her claim was
denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted
the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She's gay, so clearly
polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern
than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100
out of pocket, she just couldn't afford her medication
anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of
this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her
that in the middle of her final exam period she'd been in the
emergency room all night in excruciating pain. She wrote,
"It was so painful, I woke up thinking I'd been shot."
Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size
of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have
surgery to remove her entire ovary. She's not here this
morning. She's in a doctor's office right now. Since last
year's surgery, she's been experiencing night sweats, weight
gain, and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of
the removal of her ovary. She's 32 years old. As she put it:
"If my body is indeed in early menopause, no fertility
specialist in the world will be able to help me have my
own children. I will have no chance at giving my mother
her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because the
insurance policy that I paid for totally unsubsidized by
my school wouldn't cover my prescription for birth control
when I needed it." Now, in addition to facing the health
complications that come with having menopause at an early
age--increased risk of cancer, heart disease,
osteoporosis, she may never be able to be a mom.
Perhaps you think my friend's tragic story is rare. It's
not. One student told us doctors believe she has
endometriosis, but it can't be proven without surgery, so the
insurance hasn't been willing to cover her medication. Last
week, a friend of mine told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome.
She's struggling to pay for her medication
and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the
barriers erected by Georgetown's policy, she hasn't been
reimbursed for her medication since last August. I sincerely
pray that we don't have to wait until she loses an ovary or
is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of
all of these women are taken seriously.
This is the message that not requiring coverage of
contraception sends. A woman's reproductive healthcare isn't
a necessity, isn't a priority. One student told us that she
knew birth control wasn't covered, and she assumed that's how
Georgetown's insurance handled all of women's sexual
healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn't go to the
doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted
infections because she thought insurance wasn't going to
cover something like that, something that was related to a
woman's reproductive health. As one student put it, "this
policy communicates to female students that our school
doesn't understand our needs." These are not feelings that
male fellow students experience. And they're not burdens that
male students must shoulder.
In the media lately, conservative Catholic organizations
have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a
Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to
be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable
burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that
our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of cura
personalis, to care for the whole person, by meeting all of
our medical needs. We expected that when we told our
universities of the problems this policy created for
students, they would help us. We expected that when 94% of
students opposed the policy, the university would respect our
choices regarding insurance students pay for completely
unsubsidized by the university, especially when the
university already provides contraceptive coverage to faculty
and staff. We did not expect that women would be told in the
national media that if we wanted comprehensive insurance that
met our needs, not just those of men, we should have gone to
school elsewhere, even if that meant a less prestigious
university. We refuse to pick between a quality education and
our health, and we resent that, in the 21st century, anyone
thinks it's acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply
because we are women.
Many of the students whose stories I've shared are Catholic
women, so ours is not a war against the church. It is a
struggle for access to the healthcare we need. The President
of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit
colleges and universities appreciate the modification to the
rule announced last week. Religious concerns are addressed
and women get the healthcare they need. That is something we
can all agree on. Thank you.
Mrs. BOXER. Madam President, this is a panel of men who were called by House Republican Chairman Issa to testify about women's health--not one woman there, but they were the experts. They denied this woman the chance to speak. If she had been allowed to speak, this is what she wanted to say:
She had a friend who went to the doctor, and the friend had a cyst on her ovary. The doctor said: You have to take birth control. That is going to help. Those pills are going to help reduce the size of that cyst.
She couldn't afford the birth control pills and her employer wouldn't cover them, so she couldn't take them. She is a student. She wrote her friend saying that the cyst "was so painful, I woke up thinking I'd been shot."
I will quote part of the friend's testimony relaying what her friend told her.
Without taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size
of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have
surgery to remove her entire ovary. She's not here this
morning. She's in a doctor's office right now. Since last
year's surgery, she has been experiencing night sweats,
weight gain, and other symptoms of early menopause as a
result of the removal of her ovary. She's 32 years old. As
she put it, "If my body is indeed in early menopause, no
fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me
have my own children. I will have no chance of giving my
mother her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because
the insurance policy that I paid for totally unsubsidized by
my school wouldn't cover my prescription for birth control
when I needed it."
And so her friend says:
Now, in addition to facing the health complications that
come with having menopause at an early age--increased risk of
cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis--she may never be able to
be a mom.
So when we talk about the Blunt amendment, we are not talking about
some obtuse issue, we are not talking about some philosophical issue.
What we are talking about when we talk about the Blunt amendment is a
young woman, a student at law school who couldn't afford to pay for the
birth control pills which would have saved her fertility, which would
have saved her horrific pain--a painful operation where she lost her
ovary simply because she couldn't have access to her birth control
pills.
This is not about some argument that doesn't have real consequences for our people. The Presiding Officer's constituents and my constituents deserve to have access to preventive care. They deserve to have access to essential health care. The Blunt amendment will take that away from them. It will take that away from them. And all on a highway bill. All on a highway bill.
So let's keep the Blunt amendment away from this highway bill. This highway bill is a product of strong bipartisanship, as the Presiding Officer has told the Senate. Let's keep it clean. Let's keep out these extraneous amendments that will roll back environmental laws that are cleaning up the air, that will keep the arsenic and the mercury out of the air and the lead out of the air. Let's not roll back these laws on a highway bill. Let's get the highway bill done. When we have other arguments about other issues, let's put those issues on a relevant bill.
This is the time now for us to pull together, not pull apart. The Nation needs us to work together. It is an election year, and it is a difficult time. There is a lot of name-calling going on out there on the campaign trail, but we are still here, last I checked, and we are supposed to be doing our work for the American people. We have a chance to do it on this highway bill. Let's defeat the Blunt amendment in the morning.
I thank my friends for coming over to the floor and speaking so eloquently today against this dangerous, precedent-setting Blunt amendment that will turn back the clock on women's health and on our families' health.
I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum. ____________________
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the United States federal government (see 17 U.S.C. 105).
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