“The spectacle the country is witnessing in the Senate this week is shameful – an exercise in putting politics and ideology ahead of women’s and the country’s needs.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the greatest advance for women’s health in a generation. The move to gut it, coupled with the plan to repeal Medicaid expansion, is mean-spirited and indefensible; it would cause devastating harm by denying essential health care to millions. Nearly 18 million people, the majority of them women, have gained health coverage through the ACA. The uninsured rate is at a historic low. And more than 12 million new people have enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program since October 2013. Thirty states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid under the ACA. Reconciliation bill supporters would take away all those gains.

And they would defund Planned Parenthood – a trusted health care provider that millions of women rely on for high-quality preventive care, including birth control, cancer screenings, screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and abortion care. If Planned Parenthood were to lose federal funding for a year, women would go without the health care they need. Attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on women’s health, plain and simple. The Senate must refuse to sacrifice women’s health to an anti-choice, anti-women agenda.

Only the most cynical lawmakers could count it a victory when women lose access to contraception and other reproductive health care – when Medicaid beneficiaries lose their health coverage – when we reverse the progress the ACA has brought.

The politically motivated, irresponsible attacks on the ACA and Planned Parenthood must end. The nation will be better off if the Senate rejects this bill or when President Obama vetoes it – and when all lawmakers govern in the country’s best interest.”