Reproductive healthcare hypocrisy
Wittman makes inappropriate medical decisions for his constituents
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On Tuesday, our Myth of the Week series continued: Is Wittman helping farmers? (Surprise: he is not.)
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I do not believe Washington knows better than patients, families, and doctors how health care decisions should be made. Americans deserve the freedom to choose the care that works best for them — not a one-size-fits-all system dictated by federal bureaucrats.
- Congressman Rob Wittman
Think Rob Wittman believes that you’re entitled to control your own body and make your own medical decisions? Think again.
A key factor in reproductive rights is the concept of bodily autonomy: the freedom to make decisions about our own bodies and do with them as we see fit. In reproductive healthcare, this freedom relates to a range of procedures and tests like vasectomies, cervical cancer screenings, and in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
Science has produced more tools for supporting our reproductive health than ever before, including obstetric and gynecological care, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and birth control, which allows us the freedom to choose when and how we grow our families.
But Wittman’s anti-reproductive freedom votes over the years paint a grim picture of how much he opposes our access to the full range of reproductive rights to which we’re entitled. He claims to be a champion of healthcare freedom, infant rights, and families — but all of that is a shield he uses to wage attacks on the health and freedom of pregnant people.
He also communicates in coded and anti-choice language such as “fetal personhood” and “born alive” to make it appear he’s protecting fetuses and infants, when in fact his true goal is to control every aspect of our reproductive lives.
Let’s examine his voting record on reproductive healthcare and rights in more detail.
Extreme personhood bills
Congressman Wittman prioritizes collections of cells above living human beings. How do we know this?
Between 2007-2021, he co-sponsored NINE extreme personhood bills, collectively called the Sanctity of Human Life Act. These bills allege that from the moment of conception or cloning, an embryo or even a fertilized egg has the same rights as any born person, including federal and state Constitutional rights. If any one of these bills passed, there would be catastrophic consequences.
By supporting extreme personhood bills, Wittman tells us he rejects the bodily autonomy of pregnant people — and by extension, the rest of us. His endorsement of these bills speaks to a thirst for control over the bodies of pregnant people, most of whom are cisgender women. Even more broadly, we can understand that Wittman somehow believes that medical decisions — specifically when they relate to the lives and bodies of women and of pregnant people — are best made by legislators with no insight into specifics or circumstances and with zero medical knowledge.
Wittman’s obsession with extreme personhood bills tells us he believes people with uteruses aren’t entitled to the same bodily freedoms and protections as everyone else, and that women especially are nothing more than vessels for breeding, with fewer rights and entitlements than the embryos they might carry. And if they experience pregnancy complications that could kill them? Wittman’s answer: tough luck.
That’s not reproductive freedom; that’s enslavement.
Abortion rights under attack
Pregnancy involves a multitude of complications and risks. Sometimes abortion is needed to save the life of the pregnant person, especially if that person is a child who became pregnant from incest or rape.
Constraints on abortion endanger pregnant people’s lives and health and can lead to forced births, sometimes under the most inhumane circumstances. There are multiple reasons people need safe, reliable, affordable, and timely access to abortion.
But as Wittman’s voting record reveals, he’s a staunch believer in forced birth and other cruel abortion restrictions. Here are a few examples of the many, many anti-abortion bills he voted for, signed, and/or co-sponsored:
H. R. 3 (5/2011) - bans federal health coverage that includes abortion
H. R. 5939 (7/2010) - bars funding for abortion under federal ACA plans
H. R. 00003 (5/2011) - prohibits federal funding for abortion
H. R. 1122 (3/2013) - prohibits school health centers from providing information about abortion
H. R. 0217 (1/2013) - forbids family planning assistance that includes abortion
H. R. 0036 (5/2015) - bans abortion after twenty weeks’ gestation, with a life of the mother exception
H. R. 962 (2/2019) - to prevent infanticide, which is already illegal
H.Con.Res.3 (2023) - resolution condemning violence against “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs)
“Crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) are not-for-profit centers with a specifically anti-choice agenda that deceptively target people who are suffering because of unplanned pregnancies. CPCs are not health care providers; they have an ideological mission to prevent people from accessing abortion care. Virginia’s CPCs outnumber actual reproductive healthcare providers by a ratio of 4:1. And as we saw in his voting record, Wittman voted to support them.
All the anti-abortion bills wholeheartedly embraced by Wittman have serious, life-threatening consequences. Imagine being pregnant while sick with cancer and having to choose between your health and bankruptcy (H. R. 3). H. R. 962 promotes a false narrative because federal and state infanticide laws already make it illegal to intentionally end an infant’s life. It’s designed to punish a pregnant person and their healthcare providers. The real goal of H. R. 962 is to “make abortion illegal, criminalizing patients and providers in the process.”
When asked on video about women being jailed for pregnancy outcomes, Wittman responded, “Protect those infants. Protect the infants that are born alive.” When further pressed, he added, “We’re protecting the women by protecting their infants that are born alive.”
His statement demands pushback because an “infant” is, by definition, a baby in the first stage of their childhood. A fetus who has not yet been born is not an infant. A pregnant person is never gestating an infant. By the time an infant exists, there is no pregnancy. Wittman’s claim of “protecting the women by protecting their infants” is completely nonsensical; there’s no universe in which penalizing women for pregnancy outcomes equates to protecting them. Perhaps he intentionally muddies the issue to hide the reproductive healthcare threat lurking beneath his deceptive language.
Wittman’s robotic repetition of anti-abortion and anti-reproductive-freedom talking points speaks volumes: he deems pregnant people less worthy of healthcare and support compared to the fetuses they gestate.
Here’s a better idea: let’s build a better nation and a more thriving economy by protecting the adults who are doing the work of nurturing new humans. That can be accomplished by ensuring they get the best medical care for their own health and the health of their children, during and after pregnancy. Let’s protect them with paid family leave, robust social safety nets, and other wraparound services that help them to navigate the complexity of pregnancy and its aftermath, and to thrive in family life.
Threats to our reproductive freedom
Reproductive freedom means we have the right to:
Bodily autonomy
Contraception, fertility treatment, and abortion
Quality maternal and prenatal care
Information about our bodies and reproductive systems
The right to grow our families at a time of our choosing
Wittman doesn’t believe we should have those rights — or at least not many of them. Reproductive Freedom for All gave him a score of 0% in 2024. In that year, he voted:
to rescind Title IX Protections
to ban payment or reimbursement for service members who incurred abortion care-related expenses
to stigmatize pregnant students and spread disinformation about abortion, and
to fund anti-abortion centers.
In 2022, he voted against the Right to Contraception Act and the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. This threat to bodily autonomy cuts both ways: what’s to stop Wittman from going after men who want vasectomies? After all, men need reproductive healthcare, too.
Wittman’s anti-reproductive healthcare votes cause ripple effects. For example, Virginia is the only Southern state without an abortion ban. State lawmakers introduced a constitutional amendment for reproductive freedom in 2025 in part because Wittman and other legislators refuse to help enshrine abortion rights at the federal level.
Medical abortions are safe and effective, but Wittman ignored the science and voted to penalize the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for expanding access to mifepristone in 2023. That was another vote to endanger pregnant people. There’s a pattern here: why is he so preoccupied with punishing and criminalizing people’s reproductive health choices? Why does he believe it is his right or his job to make healthcare decisions, even on matters of life and death? Remember, he said: “I do not believe Washington knows better than patients, families, and doctors how health care decisions should be made. Americans deserve the freedom to choose the care that works best for them — not a one-size-fits-all system dictated by federal bureaucrats.” Wittman is a self-righteous hypocrite.
Ripping away healthcare, reproductive and otherwise
People of all genders need reproductive healthcare. Wittman has both sabotaged our reproductive healthcare access and voted to raise healthcare costs.
He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) more than 40 times. Then he broke the ACA and caused devastating cuts to Medicaid by voting for H. R.1, which sabotaged the healthcare coverage many VA-01 residents rely on to access reproductive care and all other medical care. 300,000 Virginians risk losing their healthcare coverage thanks to Wittman.
The $50.4 billion cuts from H. R. 1 put rural hospitals in VA-01 at risk of closing, endangering pregnant people who lack any other options for obstetric care. So much can go medically wrong surrounding a birth. If hospitals close, what can people do in the event of pregnancy complications or needing to give birth? Does Wittman have a plan to help, or will pregnant people bleed out or die during the hours-long drive to a distant hospital?
Wittman voted to defund Planned Parenthood (H. R. 3762; 2015). It’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood provides all sorts of preventive care services that extend way beyond abortion services and reproductive healthcare. The latest attack on Planned Parenthood is H. R.271 - Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2025, which would prevent people from accessing care and would cost taxpayers $52 million over 10 years. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, so no doubt Wittman will be the first in line to vote “Yea.”
Adoption pressure
Wittman supports cruel family separation over financially supporting pregnant people when they’re in crisis. His Adoption Information Act, if passed, would force family planning services “to provide pamphlets containing contact information for adoption centers to anyone receiving family planning services.” If the family services providers refused to share the pamphlets, they’d lose federal funding.
This draconian tactic would pressure economically disadvantaged pregnant people into relinquishing their children. By introducing and promoting this bill, Wittman fails to prioritize keeping families intact by giving them the necessary financial assistance to help them raise their own children. Instead, it signals his preference for family separation and traumatizing children who are removed from their birth families due to financial hardship.
If his bill passed and some pregnant people chose adoption under duress as a result, it would mean they would lose their child and their right to grow their family at a time of their choosing. Wittman’s “pro-family” claims aren’t about family at all; they are about transferring control and autonomy from families to legislators.
Why does Wittman oppose reproductive freedom?
By voting against reproductive freedom time and time again, Wittman has inserted himself between patients and their doctors, wrestling for control over their reproductive healthcare and rights. He is anti-bodily autonomy, anti-abortion, and anti-reproductive freedom.
His motivation may not be money; in 2024, he only took a $500 donation from National Pro-Life Alliance, a Christian anti-abortion group. It seems that Wittman’s anti-reproductive freedom stance is both ideologically and politically motivated, to keep forced-birth voters on his side. His actions and voting record reveal he’ll only allow reproductive healthcare on his terms — terms so cruel they endanger lives and threaten everyone’s core freedom of bodily autonomy. There is no clause in the Constitution that gives him the right to make those decisions.
Whether it’s extreme personhood bills, forced birth, or denying accessible and affordable reproductive care to pregnant people, Wittman’s hypocrisy on reproductive healthcare and rights knows no bounds.
How do you think Congressman Rob Wittman should support your reproductive healthcare rights? Let us know what you think in the comments.
As seen on our socials
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