- Democratic Rep. Cori Bush says she is "broken up" by the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
- The 45-year-old Missouri congresswoman previously revealed that she got an abortion after being raped as a teen.
- "As much as we knew it was coming, how could it actually be a real thing?" Bush questioned.
Democratic Rep. Cori Bush — who has previously revealed that she got an abortion after being raped as a teen — said on Tuesday that she was "broken up" by a leaked US Supreme Court draft opinion that suggests that five conservative justices would overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
"I'm pretty broken up," the 45-year-old Missouri congresswoman told The New York Times in an interview on Tuesday. "Whether you have an abortion, or whether you have the child, no one is on that table with you. No one is on that bed with you."
Bush said that when she heard Monday's bombshell news that a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion shows that the court is ready to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, she immediately called her staff in disbelief.
"My brain was just saying, how could this happen?" she recalled to the Times. "As much as we knew it was coming, how could it actually be a real thing? Who could be that cruel?"
Bush is one of just a handful of lawmakers who have publicly shared that she has had an abortion.
"[W]hen I was 17, I was raped, became pregnant, and got an abortion," the congresswoman noted in a tweet last September. "And I am not ashamed."
The next day Bush opened up about what she went through during an emotional congressional hearing on abortion rights.
Bush testified before the House Oversight Committee at the time, saying that choosing to have an abortion was the "hardest decision" she ever made.
"At 18 years old, I knew it was the right decision for me," she said, adding that it was "freeing knowing I had options."
Bush told the Times on Tuesday that she never wondered whether she would be able to get a safe abortion due to the Roe v. Wade ruling.
"Now we're going to change this — after 49 years, go backward, and then tell, raise up, a generation of folks that, 'OK, you thought that this was an option for you, and now, it's not,'" she said, according to the Times.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed the authenticity of the leaked draft opinion.
"Although the document described in yesterday's reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case," the court said in a statement.