Earlier this week on the Senate floor, a group of Democrats revealed the hypocrisy of their party’s claim that conservatives are engaged in a “war on women.” When the Senate was asked to give its unanimous consent to adopt Resolution 312, which would have designated the second week of November “National Pregnancy Center Week” in honor of the life-saving and life-affirming work of America’s community-supported pregnancy centers, a group of Senate Democrats stood up to block it.
 
The resolution was brought up under the Senate’s unanimous consent rules because there was absolutely nothing contentious about it or the pregnancy-resource centers it sought to commemorate. 
 
There are approximately 2,500 pregnancy-resource centers in America. And every single day, they serve an average of 65,000 women and men faced with challenging pregnancy decisions, providing them a wide array of resources.
 
This includes, at many centers, health-care services – like pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and testing for STDs and STIs. It includes emotional and educational support – like “options counseling” and parenting classes. And it includes material and logistical assistance to help new moms and dads deal with all the little things that easily add up to big obstacles in the first weeks and months of parenthood.
 
America’s pregnancy-resource centers aren’t out to make a profit or push an agenda. They’re just there to help – and to do so in a way that is compassionate, considerate of individual privacy, and respectful of the equal dignity of all human life.
"Any way you look at it, America’s pregnancy-resource centers deserve our recognition and our respect."
Any way you look at it, America’s pregnancy-resource centers deserve our recognition and our respect. But Senate Democrats didn’t see it this way. They saw an opportunity to be divisive and further fracture an already polarized Congress. And, in the short term, they won. Because the resolution failed to receive the Senate’s unanimous consent, it was not adopted.
 
But this group of partisan obstructionists failed to realize that, in the long run, America’s pregnancy-resource centers have already won, because the real measure of their significance isn’t in the words of a floor speech or the outcome of a vote – it’s in the millions of lives they help save from the pain of abortion every year... the millions of teachers, soldiers, and nurses, neighbors, friends, and spouses, whose lives and contributions to our communities we might never have known had it not been for the unassuming heroes down at the local pregnancy center, giving their time to keep the lights on, answer the phones, and to help young women find the hope and courage to choose life.