Alex Padilla U.S. Senator for California

LOS ANGELES, CA — On the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court ruling, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) joined the Women’s March Foundation to deliver remarks at a reproductive rights rally at Los Angeles City Hall. Padilla also joined U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.-34), Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.-37), and advocates from Planned Parenthood California and Los Angeles for the event as part of the National Walk-Out for Women.

Padilla denounced the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which ignored 50 years of precedent in the Dobbs decision. He condemned Republican efforts to block commonsense bills protecting access to contraception and in vitro fertilization (IVF), and he slammed extremist state legislatures for enacting restrictive abortion bans across the country and endangering the lives and freedoms of millions of women. Marking the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Padilla called for urgent action to protect reproductive rights nationwide, refusing to accept the Republican “new normal.”

Video of Padilla’s full remarks can be found here.

Key Excerpts:

• Two years ago, the extreme wing of the Supreme Court of the United States chose to overturn 50 years of precedent, 50 years of protections. … Three Trump-appointed justices chose to tip the scales of justice at the Supreme Court and to deny women the right to make decisions about their own bodies. And as a result, here we are two years since that Dobbs decision, two years since the fall of Roe. We don’t have any other choice but to make sure that our voices are heard.

• Americans should be united on this issue. We should be working together to restore the fundamental right to an abortion and the freedom to make your own health care decisions. Yet in Washington, just last month in the Senate, we tried to do this again legislatively only to see what? Republican obstruction yet again. Extreme Republicans blocking commonsense legislation to protect access to contraception, to protect access to IVF.

• While radical Republicans think, you know what, just give it time, the American public will get used to this post-Roe era. We’re here to say no way. We’re not going to accept that. Not now, not ever. So while we shouldn’t have to be here protesting, we’re going be here protesting because we refuse to be silent.

• We’re not going to let the extremists in the Republican Party or the extremists on the Supreme Court define us. We will define the future of the United States of America.

• And we will ensure that the future of the United States of America provides more rights for our daughters, not less rights for our daughters than their grandmothers had.

• We’ll keep speaking up. We’ll keep walking out. We’ll keep marching. We’ll do whatever it takes to elect more pro-choice elected officials at all levels of government and restore our fundamental rights. 

Senator Padilla is a staunch defender of reproductive rights. Two years ago, Padilla sharply rebuked the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. He also criticized the ongoing attacks on reproductive health care access last year during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “The Assault on Reproductive Rights in a Post-Dobbs America.”

As a cosponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, Padilla is fighting to protect abortion access throughout the United States. Last year, he and Senator Murray introduced legislation to protect doctors who provide abortions from attempts to restrict their practice and create uncertainty about their legal liability. While Republican-led state legislatures work to deny reproductive rights, he’s also fighting to protect patients’ rights to travel freely between states to access abortion care.

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