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Democrats Block Resolution Honoring Pregnancy Resource Centers
WASHINGTON—Today, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) requested unanimous consent from the Senate to approve Senate Resolution 312, which would designate the second week in November as “National Pregnancy Center Week.” Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) objected to the request.
Senator Lee’s remarks as prepared for delivery are below, the resolution is available here, and video can be viewed on Senator Lee’s YouTube page.
Mr./Madam President, I rise today to support, and to request the Senate’s approval of, Senate Resolution 312 – a resolution that would designate this week in November “National Pregnancy Center Week,” in honor of the life-saving and life-affirming work of America’s community-supported pregnancy centers.
I am asking for my colleagues’ unanimous consent because there is absolutely nothing contentious about this resolution or the pregnancy-resource centers it commemorates.
There are approximately twenty-five hundred pregnancy-resource centers in America. And every single day, they serve an average of sixty-five thousand women and men faced with challenging pregnancy decisions, providing them a wide array of resources.
This includes, at many centers, health-care services – like pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and testing for STDs and STIs.
It includes emotional and educational support – like “options counseling” and parenting classes.
And it includes material and logistical assistance to help new moms and dads deal with all the little things that easily add up to big obstacles in the first weeks and months of parenthood.
America’s pregnancy-resource centers aren’t out to make a profit or push an agenda. They’re just there to help – and to do so in a way that is compassionate, considerate of individual privacy, and respectful of the equal dignity of all human life.
Mr./Madam President, any way you look at it, America’s pregnancy-resource centers deserve to be recognized with a “National Pregnancy Center Week.”
But the real measure of their significance isn’t in the words of a floor speech or the outcome of a vote – it’s in the thousands of lives they help save from abortion every year. The millions of teachers, soldiers, and nurses, neighbors, friends, and spouses, whose lives and contributions to our communities we might never have known had it not been for the unassuming heroes down at the local pregnancy center, giving their time to keep the lights on, answer the phones, and to help young women and men find the hope and courage to choose life.
