Republican Senator Katie Britt, who was last seen making a fool of herself from her own kitchen during her State of the Union Response, has put forth legislation that could end up creating a national database with the personal information of every pregnant woman in America. Britt claims that the legislation would only create resources for pregnant women to understand their options (options that don’t include any information about terminating a pregnancy,) but the legislation actually says that women can enter their information for the government to track and store. This is exceptionally dangerous, given the laws that are popping up all over the country, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Republican Senator Katie Britt has been laying pretty much low ever since she hit her career low of providing the State of the Union response this year where she was widely mocked, including by people within her own party. But Katie Britt reemerged this past weekend announcing that she has introduced legislation called The More Opportunity for Moms to Succeed Act, or the Moms Act that would effectively create a database here in the United States of every person who is pregnant. Now, if that idea alone doesn’t terrify the crap out of you, then let me elaborate a little bit more. What Britt’s legislation does, or what she says it does, is of course we want to provide this database, pregnancy.gov is what it would be, and we’re gonna provide all of these resources for people who are pregnant, you know, adoption agencies, where you can go and get care.
But her legislation expressly forbids, including any information whatsoever to women. If a clinic provides abortion services, which means, by the way, a majority of the OBGYNs in this country would not legally be allowed to be listed as resources for women, even if women aren’t seeking out an abortion at one of these places, because they offer those services, you wouldn’t be able to see their information in the database. So that’s bad enough, right? And Britt swears up and down that this legislation is of course not going to create a database of pregnant women. That would be terrible. We’re not gonna collect their private data, she says. Well, according to the Guardian, quote, the website would direct users to enter their personal data and contact information. And although Britt’s Communications Director said the site would not collect data on pregnant people, page three of the bill states that users can take an assessment through the website and provide consent to use the user’s contact information, which government officials may use to conduct outreach via phone or email to follow up with users on additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review.
Aw, so we’re not gonna collect your data except when we collect your data. And if you don’t want us to contact you, that’s fine, but we’ll still have your data and we can follow up. Do you realize how horrifying this is? Because we have states in this country right now that have passed legislation that say it’s illegal for a pregnant woman to leave their anti-abortion state to travel to a blue state to have the procedure done. You will be prosecuted. You’ll be thrown in jail for murder. Now, wouldn’t it be helpful for those states if there was some kind of federal database that was keeping track of every single pregnant woman in this country? That’s exactly what this legislation is about. That is exactly what Katie Britt is trying to do here.
She is trying to make sure that we have this unified uniform database where every single pregnant woman in this country is listed alphabetically, state by state, so that if your state believes a woman may have left the country, all you gotta do is request this info from the federal government. They will gladly hand it over and then you can begin your prosecutions. That’s what this is. Horrific, post-apocalyptic, whatever you want to call this, it’s disgusting. The only bright side to this is of course, the fact that Republicans are in the minority in the Senate. So this bill is not going to pass. But it’s a blueprint for what Republicans will do if they take back control of the Senate after this year’s elections. So voters, you’re put on notice right now. If you don’t want to see this legislation ever become a law in this country, you know exactly which party to vote against this coming November.