Healthy moms mean healthy families. When my Republican colleagues held a hearing about birth control and refused to include a single woman on the first panel as a witness, I asked, "Where are the women?"

I was proud to be an original cosponsor of the Violence Against Women Act when Congress passed it in 1994, and was proud to support the previous renewals in 2000 and 2005. These bills always enjoyed large, bipartisan support.

Healthy moms mean healthy families. When my Republican colleagues held a hearing about birth control and refused to include a single woman on the first panel as a witness, I asked, "Where are the women?"

You see we're a country that talks about family values. But we haven't passed anything to help family values since the Family and Medical Leave Act. And the Family and Medical Leave Act was one of the first things I voted on when I came to Congress. It was very thrilling to me, because when my first child was born, I was terrified of being fired. When my second child was born, I was a member of the city council, and in some ways it was easier to respond to 250 constituents than it was to respond to one employer.

The reports that Media Matters have done about sexism in our society and really the mainstream media called Hillary Clinton "castrating," they called her the B word, they called her all kinds of horrible things. And I think in a sense that it raised the awareness in our country, so that we can have a national discussion about it.

I think that changing stereotypes and attitudes, it takes time. As we progress and we have more women astronauts and more women in construction sites and everything else, then we're making progress. Discrimination is deeply embedded in our community, but we do have the tools to combat it.

Women deserve the same permanent rights and explicit protections given men in the Constitution.