House Democrats voted on Friday to determine a federal right to abortion, moving swiftly to advance the measure after the supreme court declined to prevent a Texas law effectively outlawing the procedure and as they await a separate ruling next year that would further erode access.
The legislation, named the Women’s Health and Protection Act, is a component of the party’s strategy to keep off against the push of state laws restricting abortions and to point out their determination to defend reproductive rights, a problem they believe will resonate before the 2022 midterm elections. Joe Biden has urged support for the measure, but Republican opposition within the Senate about ensures the bill won’t reach his desk.
With the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, presiding over the vote, the House passed the measure 218-211. All Republicans and one Democrat, congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas, opposed the bill The bill is unlikely to advance within the Senate, where Republican opposition is certain to stop the measure from winning the 60 votes necessary to beat a filibuster. Nevertheless, the Senate legislator Chuck announced on Friday that he intended to bring the bill to the ground for a vote “in the very near future.”
“We are currently seeing unprecedented and unconscionable Republican attacks on reproductive rights across the country laced with vicious vigilantism,” Schumer said during a joint statement with Senate sponsors of the bill. “Congress must assert its role to guard the constitutional right to abortion.”
The near-total party line vote reflects a decades-long shift within the Democratic party’s embrace of reproductive issues. While Democratic leaders were once reluctant to bring such measures to the ground out of concern for the more socially conservative members of their caucus, nearly every congressional Democrat supports abortion rights and people who don’t, like Cuellar, have faced increasingly difficult primary challenges.
The debate before the vote was passionate and private , as was expected for what has become one among the foremost polarizing issues in American politics. Some Democrats recalled the “dark ages” before Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 supreme court decision that established a right to abortion nationwide.
“Roe v Wade wasn’t the start of girls having abortions,” said Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois. “It was the top of girls dying from abortions Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat of Texas, waved a wire clothes hanger as a logo of the damaging – and sometimes deadly – methods women would use to aim an abortion before it had been legalized.
Republicans rose to denounce the bill, arguing that it might allow “abortion on demand” at every stage of pregnancy, even until birth The measure “isn’t about freedom for ladies ,” said Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler, a Republican from Missouri. “It’s about death for babies.”
The legislation would codify abortion rights into federal law and prohibit states from imposing “medically unnecessary” restrictions that make it difficult to perform and access. it might allow an abortion after viability – the purpose at which a healthy fetus can survive outside the womb, typically between 21 and 24 weeks – only in cases where the mother’s health is in danger .
Congresswoman Judy Chu of California, the lead author of the bill, has introduced versions of this legislation in previous cycles. But Democrats moved to vote thereon for the primary time after the supreme court refused to intervene to dam a Texas law that prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, roughly the sixth week of pregnancy – before many ladies even know they’re pregnant. The court didn’t address the constitutionality of the law, but many advocates on each side of the abortion debate viewed the choice as a possible sign of how it’d rule out a coming challenge to Roe.
The Texas law makes no exemptions for pregnancies that are the results of rape or incest. It also effectively deputizes ordinary citizens no matter where they live to enforce the law, allowing them to gather $10,000 for successfully bring a lawsuit against anyone found to “aid or abet” an illegal abortion.
The Biden administration sued Texas, arguing that the law is clearly unconstitutional. a minimum of two lawsuits are filed – one by a person in Arkansas and another by a person in Illinois – against a doctor in Texas who published an op-ed claiming to possess performed an abortion in violation of the new law.
Democrats warned of copycat laws shooting up in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. But they’re also bracing for a supreme court decision next year, when it’ll rule on a Mississippi law that seeks to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy – an immediate challenge to Roe.
There is widespread fear among proponents of reproductive rights that the present court, composed of six conservative justices, three of whom Donald Trump appointed to be “pro-life”, could further roll back or entirely dismantle Roe We cannot believe Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh to verify our rights for us,” Chu said at a news conference on Friday morning. “Congress must protect the rights of girls and pregnant people in every postcode .”
Formidable Republican opposition awaits within the evenly-divided Senate, where it remains unclear if the bill could win the support of all 50 Democrats within the chamber. Two members of the caucus who oppose abortion rights, senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin of West Virginia , haven’t co-sponsored the bill.
One of only a couple of remaining pro-abortion Republicans, Senator Susan Collins of Maine told the LA Times she opposes th bill and is functioning with other senators to craft a bill that might “truly would codify Roe Public opinion polls have consistently found strong support for keeping abortion legal altogether or some circumstances The Biden administration said it “strongly supports” passage of this bill in light of “Texas’ unprecedented attack” on abortion access Our daughters and granddaughters deserve an equivalent rights that their mothers and grandmothers fought for and won—and that a transparent majority of the American people support,” the White House said during a statement of administration policy. “We won’t allow this country to travel backwards on women’s equality.”
