What Cory Booker’s White House Office of Reproductive Freedom Would Actually Look Like if He Becomes President
Cory Booker plans to create a White House Office of Reproductive Freedom if he’s elected president.
While talking to Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief Jessica Pels in The Candidates Come to Cosmo series, he explained what that means.
While reproductive rights have not come up in the Democratic primary debates as much as some would hope, many of the presidential candidates still have plans proposed to protect them. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, for one, wants an entire White House office dedicated to it.
When he visited Cosmopolitan as part of The Candidates Come to Cosmo series, Editor-in-Chief Jessica Pels brought up the idea of a White House Office of Reproductive Freedom, asking Booker to explain what it would look like and why reproductive freedom is important to him.
Here’s his answer, in a nutshell: “The White House Office of Reproductive Freedom would be coordinating amongst agencies and activists and groups to try to make sure that we restore and reaffirm a woman’s reproductive rights. And not only dealing with it in just access to abortion, which is health care, not only deal with access to contraceptive care, which is health care, but expanding that also and dealing with reproductive freedom.”
This proposed office would deal with repro freedom “in the largest sense of the understanding,” which means infertility and maternal and infant mortality would all fall under its umbrella.
For a more comprehensive sense of his plan, read Booker’s full explanation, below:
“So I’ll tell you what it looks like, and then let’s get into why it’s important to me. We have seen, since Roe v. Wade, we’ve seen decades of a coordinated attack on a woman’s right to control her own body. And this coordinated attack has been think tanks, and I saw the law review articles. I mean, it has been efforts going on to tear down Roe v. Wade for decades now. We see the coordinated attack now coming to a head with Alabama laws and Ohio closing Planned Parenthoods, working its way to the Supreme Court. We’ve seen it with attacks on Title X funding. We’ve seen it in the Hyde Amendment.
You can go through all the ways in which, and by the way, it’s mostly an assault not just on a woman’s right—or person’s right, I should say—to control their own body, because a lot of transgender men and others should have the right. We should be inclusive in our language. But it is particularly an assault on low-income people, and this is something that really ticks me off to see it done that way.
Okay, so in order to deal with a coordinated attack, we better coordinate better. So the White House Office of Reproductive Freedom would be coordinating amongst agencies and activists and groups to try to make sure that we restore and reaffirm a woman’s reproductive rights. And not only dealing with it in just access to abortion, which is health care, not only deal with access to contraceptive care, which is health care, but expanding that also and dealing with reproductive freedom. We don’t talk about infertility enough and understand that there are things that should be covered by insurance to help with infertility that are not. I’m a big activist in that area. We don’t talk enough about maternal mortality, infant mortality. So this office will be dealing with reproductive freedom in the largest sense of the understanding.
Why is it important to me? Look, there’s a couple of ways I can go at this. One way, just to get this off my chest, is after the Alabama law and a lot of things were happening, there was a big rally in front of the Supreme Court that I spoke at, a number of senators spoke at. And I remember going out there and just getting really upset because it must’ve been 5 to 1, maybe even more than that, maybe 10 to 1, women to men protesting in front of the Supreme Court.
And men should not be taking a back seat on this. They should be leading on this along with women. That’s something I’m going to, no matter what position I hold, that I’m going to fight for. To live in a country where someone who is a survivor of rape and incest as a teenager, and they’re going to be told by the government what they have to do with their body. The Alabama bill would give the doctor that performed the abortion a longer sentence than the actual rapist.
We should have a nation that is about empowering individual rights and individual freedoms. And what’s happening right now is an assault on that, it is endangering the lives of Americans, it is taking away freedom of liberty, and I will not allow it. I share people’s goals about a nation that is just and fair and equal, and the way you achieve that is not by stripping health care away but by providing it. Not by stripping rights and freedoms away but by restoring them. To me, this is, I cannot sit here as a man, as a black man, enjoying the rights other people fought for without understanding that I can never pay them back, but I’m going to pay it forward by fighting to make sure we get to a day in America where everyone is free and everyone can enjoy the abundance that comes with a nation that honors liberty and dignity.”
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