When confronting the sex traffickers who stole his daughter, Liam Neeson's character in Taken (2008) memorably explained how he would deal with them:

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you."

It's too bad Congress doesn't have the same resolve. The Combat Human Trafficking Act of 2015 is meant to help victims of sex trafficking and slavery by strengthening law enforcement and creating programs funded by fees paid by perpetrators. It's a win-win: people get help and it doesn't cost taxpayers anything. Because of that, it had bipartisan support-until Senate Republicans changed their minds and refused to pass it.

Why? Once again, Republicans are blocking the passage of a bill until their narrow ideological demands are met. In this case, Republicans have added a provision to the bill that would employ the Hyde Amendment and ban the use of funds to provide abortions for victims of sex trafficking. In their minds, it is much more important for Congress to prevent a 14-year-old rape victim from having an abortion than it is to save the lives of thousands of children and adults who have been forced into prostitution and modern slavery-people broken by violence and terrorized by pimps and pornographers.

This would be laughable if the reality of sex trafficking in the United States wasn't so horrifying. Most Americans only know about sex trafficking from the movies, but sex trafficking is a real thing that occurs in almost every community. That statistics speak for themselves:

1. Human trafficking is big business, netting nearly $10 billion a year for the perpetrators.
2. Shared Hope International reports that "at least 100,000 children are used as prostitutes each year" in the United States.
3. "One in six runaways in 2014 were likely sex trafficking victims. That is up from one in seven in 2013," according to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
4. The U.S. Department of Justice finds that "the average age of entry into prostitution for a child victim in the United States is 13-14 years old."
5. The Polaris Project, an advocacy group that supports survivors and fights for appropriate public policies to stop human and sex trafficking, found that "the average victim may be forced to have sex up to 20-48 times a day."
6. There were at least 3,598 sex trafficking cases inside the United States in 2014 alone.

Sex trafficking in the United States is not a small problem. It is an outrage.

The greater outrage, though, may be that Republicans would rather deny the passage of this law, which will help hundreds of thousands of people, than enact it without stringent anti-abortion restrictions tied to it. The further outrage is that they would further enslave victims of sex trafficking by forcing them to bear children as a result of rape or forced prostitution, which is really just another form of rape.

Even then, Republicans have not stopped there. They have also tried to blame their obstructionism on Democrats by tying the bill to the vote for the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, the generally approved candidate for Attorney General. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to schedule the final vote on Lynch's candidacy until Democrats give up their objections to the anti-abortion language.

The Republican version is not accurate. The true story is the continual insistence of Republicans to force their ideological agenda into every aspect of legislation, and therefore, into every aspect of American life. Senator Barbara Boxer responded to Republican accusations of obstruction by pointing this out:

"Democrats want to move forward on the human trafficking bill. We are ready to debate the clean bill with the same language that was supported by both Democrats and Republicans last year. We could pass a bill in 15 minutes if the GOP would take out this egregious provision that would hurt the very women we are trying to help: victims of sex trafficking. All Republicans need to do is end their sneak attack on women's health."

Contact your senators today to urge them to resist Republican attempts to block this bill and take away the opportunity for freedom and new lives for thousands of Americans.