WATCH: Pressley Makes Plain the Traumatic, Generational Harm of Republicans’ Denying Abortion Care, Offers Vision for True Reproductive Justice

Transcript: Pressley Makes Plain the Traumatic, Generational Harm of Republicans’ Denying Abortion Care, Offers Vision for True Reproductive Justice

U.S. Capitol

June 24, 2026

I will not be brief, but I will be blunt, because the harm that is happening in this country is very blunt.

And when I consider the fact that I have been in Congress for eight years and was elected in the 116th Congress to, at that time what was characterized as the first pro-choice majority Congress in the history of Congress, and we worked hard to make that more than a talking point.

It’s my great honor to co-chair the Reproductive Freedom Caucus alongside Diana DeGette, and I’ll underscore that, because everything that’s happening right now was outlined in Project 2025 and this authoritarian regime that means to march us towards a nation of forced birth.

This is an anti-freedom agenda.

When they attack the free press, they degrade free speech.

They want to control the books we read, and they want to control what we do with our very bodies.

It is an anti-freedom agenda, and this is a somber moment.

Today, I come before you with a heavy heart, because I fear that America has normalized women bleeding out in parking lots denied basic health care.

Today I come before you with a heavy heart, because I fear that in America the suffering of women has become background noise.

Tell me how this is possible when the preventable death of a loved one is a kind of heartbreak that defies words, a permanent heartbreak that crushes dreams and is felt across generations.

In our home, I have an ancestor wall, and on that wall is my paternal grandmother, a woman I never had the privilege of meeting and knowing.

My grandmother Carrie, my father’s mother, died in childbirth in the 1950s. It impacted the trajectory of my father’s entire life, and that of his five siblings.

And yet still in America today, the statistical odds of a Black woman’s safe passage through childbirth remain much the same as the days of my Grandma Carrie.

And the White House refuses to name the Black maternal health crisis, because in fact they don’t even want to name—-they want to erase the word Black in their attack on DEI.

They want to erase the word, and they want to erase Black people.

But you can’t. I’ll go on.

Today in South Texas, a warehouse of pregnant children are being held—children, we don’t even know how they got pregnant. Today in South Texas, a warehouse of pregnant children are being held, imprisoned by this administration.

One more demonstration of their child abuse, child negligence, and a generation of childhood trauma that they seek to advance and exact every day.

These children are being denied abortion care and prenatal care alike, terrified 13- and 14-year-old girls, their bodies claimed by the state as property.

Today across America, in this country, women are forced by the government to carry dead fetuses inside their body until their health begins to fail because callous Republicans choke on scripture while they pass legislation that is both sloppy and fatal, and nothing Christian about it, denying women the right to essential abortion care.

Let me be clear, abortion care is essential healthcare.

I come before you today to offer a stark and damning picture, not to dissuade us from the work ahead, but to call us to action.

I speak with precision and bluntness, because that is the only way forward.

We have to stand in the gap and work with partners at every level of government to protect and expand access to care.

We must stand unified behind robust Democratic legislation that will not only codify the right to abortion care, but expand access to abortion care, protect access to birth control and IVF, save the lives of black birthing mamas, and more.

We must center and trust the women who have led local mutual aid efforts since the beginning of time, working with limited resources and deep personal sacrifices to get their neighbors, aunties, and daughters the care they need.

We’ve always done it.

Imagine an America where we speak plainly about pregnancy outcomes.

Imagine an America where every person can get the essential abortion care they need.

Imagine an America where birthing mothers are loved, supported, and celebrated.

Imagine an America where every child has a childhood.

Imagine an America where no family struggles to afford formula or diapers.

Imagine an America where everyone is truly free.

But we have to do more than imagine it. We have to work to make it so.

My colleagues and I will continue to agitate, litigate, legislate, organize, and mobilize.

Today, I’m thinking of every family that has shared their abortion story with me. I’m thinking about my mother. I’m thinking about my grandmother, who I never met. I’m thinking about our 17-year-old daughter, Cora, and the aspirations that we have for her to live a life defined by freedom and liberation.

The struggle for abortion justice is fundamental, and I promise you that every single day, I’ll continue to fight, Democrats will continue to fight, until every person who calls this country home has access to the care that they demand and deserve.