Bills on abortion access advance
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House on Friday passed two bills that would restore abortion access across the country and prevent states like Texas from barring patients from crossing state lines to receive reproductive health care, the first major legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
While the bills are almost certain to stall in the evenly divided Senate, House Democrats cast their passage as a necessary effort after the Supreme Court ruling triggered laws in Texas and other red states banning abortion, and sparked calls from the right to go further by stopping patients from crossing state lines to get abortions and cracking down on anyone who helps them.
“Right now, the rights of women and every American are on the line,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “House Democrats are ferociously defending freedom with these two important bills and we need two more Democratic pro-choice senators so that we can eliminate the filibuster and make this legislation the law of the land.”
Republicans, meanwhile, said Democrats were going too far by pushing legislation that would go beyond the protections in Roe and prohibit a swath of abortion restrictions that were long on the books in states. The bill gives patients the right to obtain abortions and health care providers the right to perform them.
The Democrats’ “effort to create a national policy that allows for terminating a pregnancy at any stage for any reason is not only extreme and outside of the mainstream of America, it is
wholly inconsistent with our values and the founding principles of our great nation,” said U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Lubbock Republican. “This abortion-on-demand legislation, taken together, will put us in the dubious company of the likes of China and North Korea and only five other countries that I guarantee you do not have America’s values.”
Both bills passed on mostly party line votes. Every Texas Republican voted no on each, and every Texas Democrat supported them, except for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo, who was the lone Democrat to vote against the bill establishing a right to abortion. Cuellar supported the bill protecting travel.
The House has passed the legislation establishing the right to an abortion before — in response to the six-week ban Texas Republicans established last year — but it was the first time the chamber has taken up the issue of travel, which has emerged as a new front in the battle over access to the procedure.
The bill that passed Friday would make it clear that the freedom to travel to other states is a constitutional right, and would prohibit states from restricting travel for those seeking to obtain a lawful abortion. The legislation would also bar states from banning businesses or groups from assisting in that travel.
The author of Texas’ six-week abortion ban, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, said Thursday in an interview with Hearst Newspapers that he would not support a ban on travel for abortions, saying “mothers are victims in this process.” He noted Senate Bill 8 already allows any private citizen to sue people who “aid or abet” in an abortion, including those who drive someone out of state for the procedure.
It comes as the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade in June sparked uncertainty in states where old statutes on abortion, some dating back a century or more, remain on the books. Some Texas GOP legislators claim those old laws — revived by the Roe ruling — already do more than just ban abortion in the state, with clauses barring anyone from “furnishing” abortions as well, which they argue prohibits businesses or advocacy groups from covering a patient’s travel costs.
“In my beloved home state of Texas, we are in a crisis. A health care crisis. A humanitarian crisis,” said U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat who authored the bill.
“Texans who can do so have been traveling out of state to obtain abortion care, first to Oklahoma and Louisiana and New Mexico and, as some of these states have now banned abortion, they are now traveling even further,” Fletcher said. “And now in response to this exercise of their constitutional right to travel between the states, lawmakers in Texas — and in other states across the country — are threatening to take away that right, too.”
Fletcher pointed to a letter the Texas Freedom Caucus sent last week to Dallas law firm Sidley Austin LLP saying the firm was “exposing itself and each of its partners to felony criminal prosecution and disbarment” for reimbursing travel costs for employees who “leave Texas to murder their unborn children.” The letter said the caucus also plans to push legislation next session that would prohibit any employer in Texas from paying for elective abortions or reimbursing abortion-related expenses, regardless of where the abortion occurs.
“This is not hypothetical and it is not hyperbole,” Fletcher said.
Republicans argued the bill is too vague and could be exploited by abusers and traffickers.
U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican who led debate for the GOP, agreed it is unconstitutional to prevent travel between states, but said the protections offered by the bill were too broad.
“Its vague language, designed to promote more abortions, undermines parent consent for minors, opens loopholes for abuse and eliminates med supervision for chemical abortions,” she said. “This bill does nothing to explicitly prevent an unrelated adult or a sexual abuser from taking a minor out of state for an abortion without parent consent.”