Marco Rubio’s long anti-abortion record has helped lay the groundwork for recent attacks on reproductive health care across the country. With Florida Republicans preparing to mimic Texas’ draconian abortion restrictions, Floridians are speaking out, and taking Rubio to task for supporting this dangerous agenda.
As Deborah Montgomery-Farrar, a registered nurse at a Palm Beach County hospital, writes in a recent op-ed, “Marco Rubio and Florida Republicans are sending a clear message with their support for these measures to ban abortion: the health and well being of Florida women don’t matter to them.”
Marco Rubio has been campaigning since the 2000’s on a platform of banning abortion and making contraceptive care more difficult to access. In the Senate, he’s made it his mission to support extremist judges who share his view that the constitutional right to abortion is a “catastrophe” and should be abolished.
SB8, the Texas law banning abortion after just six weeks — before many women even know they are pregnant — is precisely the type of policy Marco Rubio has been championing for years. As a nurse who works closely with newborns, pregnant women, and mothers, my entire job revolves around reproductive health care. My patients deserve the best standards of care, and I work every day to make sure they’re empowered to make the right decisions for themselves and their families. The last thing they need are politicians making those decisions for them.
Like Rubio, the Texas Republicans who wrote SB8 do not believe women who survived rape or incest have the right to make their own healthcare decisions. But Rubio’s attacks on women’s health care go beyond reproductive rights. He has also worked to block access to contraceptives, introducing a bill to gut health insurance coverage of birth control, and this year filing a bill to defund Planned Parenthood.
Marco Rubio and Florida Republicans are sending a clear message with their support for these measures to ban abortion: the health and well being of Florida women don’t matter to them. Back in 2001, Rubio even supported Florida’s so-called “Scarlet Letter Law,” which mandated that single mothers giving their children up for adoption publish their sexual histories in local newspapers to alert the children’s potential father of her decision.
The midterm elections are the chance for Floridians to show Marco Rubio and Florida Republicans up and down the ballot that undermining our rights is a fireable offense.