WASHINGTON — The House narrowly approved a measure on Friday intended to enact abortion rights into federal law, as Democrats sought to counter efforts at the state level to restrict abortions and growing hostility to abortion rights from the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
Acting after the high court refused to block stringent new Texas limits on abortion, lawmakers voted 218 to 211 to send the Women’s Health Protection Act to the Senate, where it faces a Republican filibuster and is unlikely to pass.
Nonetheless, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in a statement on Friday that he would schedule a vote on the measure, underscoring that Democrats see the struggle over abortion rights as a winning political issue even if the bill will not reach President Biden’s desk. Abortion rights are already emerging as a point of contention in some midterm election campaigns.
“We are currently seeing unprecedented and unconscionable Republican attacks on reproductive rights across the county laced with vicious vigilantism,” Mr. Schumer said in a joint statement with three Democratic leaders in the Senate: Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Patty Murray of Washington and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the bill’s author in that chamber. “Congress must assert its role to protect the constitutional right to abortion.”
Democratic authors of the measure heralded the House vote as historic, given what they described as mounting threats to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a right to abortion. They framed it as a sharp rebuke to the Supreme Court for allowing the Texas law prohibiting most abortions after six weeks to go into effect earlier this month.
“If the justices over there in that building won’t act, this House of Representatives will act,” said Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat and a longtime backer of abortion rights.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called for the measure to be considered soon after the Texas decision, lashed out at the court for failing to intercede to block the new law, arguing that it had ignored 50 years of precedent on abortion.
“When this court embraced this shameful Texas law, they brought shame to the United States Supreme Court,” she said before the vote. “What were they thinking, or were they thinking, or were they were just rubber-stamping what they were sent to the court to do?”
Republicans uniformly opposed the measure, which they called extreme and said would lead to abortions at all stages of pregnancy and overturn hundreds of state laws. They said the measure went far beyond codifying Roe and should more rightfully be called the “Abortion On Demand Until Birth Act.”
“This abortion-on-demand bill would destroy our country’s future,” said Representative Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana. “A child in the womb is a living person, and yet my colleagues on the other side remain obsessed with killing unborn babies in the name of female empowerment.”
“This will nullify every modest pro-life restriction ever enacted by the states,” said Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey. “This bill constitutes an existential threat to unborn babies.”
Democrats said the measure was urgently needed since the Supreme Court was set to consider a Mississippi law later this year that abortion rights activists fear could lead to further erosion of Roe v. Wade, or its outright overturning.
In the 50-50 Senate, Mr. Schumer has been reluctant to force votes on measures that lack support from at least a bare majority, since doing so would spotlight party divisions.
At least two Democrats have not endorsed the Women’s Health Protection Act, and even Republicans who have supported abortion rights in the past have said it goes well beyond the reach of Roe v. Wade.
But holding votes on the measure is a way for Democrats to demonstrate that they consider abortion rights a priority and force Republicans to go on the record against legislation that Democrats see as popular, particularly with women voters who believed that the question of abortion access had been settled with the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling.
Abortion rights supporters hailed the House action and urged the Senate to take up the measure.
“The historic House passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act is an important step in protecting the right to access an abortion in the U.S., and halting the wave of harmful and deeply unpopular abortion restrictions across the country,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Now the Senate must follow suit and immediately pass this critical legislation.”
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September 24, 2021 at 11:16PM
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House Approves Measure to Protect Abortion Rights - The New York Times
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