House Democrats, galvanized by Texas ban, vote to legalize abortion nationwide
WASHINGTON — The House on Friday voted to legalize abortion nationwide until fetal viability, and even though the legislation is almost certain to fail in the Senate, it marks a historic victory for abortion rights supporters following a decades-long fight.
The 218-211 vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act is the first the House has ever held to set a federal legal standard on abortion, and the first time in nearly 30 years that the House has approved what advocates consider a major proactive abortion rights bill.
Texas’ recent ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy has galvanized Democrats to be more forceful in their support for abortion rights and confident in the political upside of the issue.
It is a tide that has been slowly turning over the last decade, amid the election of more Democratic women to Congress, the decline of centrist Democrats who oppose abortion and the proliferation of Gop-led abortion restrictions at the state level.
“We’ve long been supporters of Roe vs. Wade,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We haven’t been able to codify it because we never had a Democratic, pro-choice majority [in the House] with a Democratic president, and now we do.”
The Texas law — which bans the procedure only two weeks after a person could typically know of a pregnancy — allows any civilian to sue anyone who helps someone access an abortion. It has served as a wakeup call to even Congress’ most ardent supporters of abortion rights, spurring the House vote to get the right to abortion enshrined into federal law.
“We cannot rely on [Supreme Court Justices] Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh to confirm our rights for us,” said Rep. Judy Chu, D-calif., who authored the bill. “Congress must protect the rights of women and pregnant people in every ZIP Code, putting an end to an attack on abortion once and for all.”
Since the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect, several Democrats, including moderates, rushed to join the bill, Chu said.
Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., who is personally opposed to abortion and over his career has had a mixed voting record on the issue, said the court’s decision to allow Texas’ law to go into effect prompted him to “evolve” on abortion rights.
“No issue has confounded me more than abortion throughout my years of public service,” he wrote in the Providence Journal. “Faced with the reality that Roe might no longer be the law of the land in a few months, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot support a reality where extremist state legislators can dictate women’s medical decisions.”
Even when Democrats have controlled the House in recent decades, there were still dozens of rank-and-file Democrats who opposed abortion, discouraging Democratic leaders from holding votes on the issue. The 2018 election marked a noticeable increase in the number of Democrats from politically contentious swing districts who leaned into abortion in their campaigns.
“It’s not a coincidence that we’ve seen more Democrats being comfortable discussing abortion rights as we’ve seen more women be elected,” said Kristen Hernandez, a spokeswoman for EMILY’S List, a group that supports Democratic women who back abortion rights.
Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-texas, who represents the Houston-area seat once held by former President George H.W. Bush, started her 2018 campaign with an ad featuring the Planned Parenthood facility where she, as a high school volunteer, tried to block antiabortion protesters.
“I’m very comfortable talking about it because I feel like our voice has not been heard,” Fletcher said in an interview. “Abortion has become a wedge issue that’s used to win elections instead of to govern responsibility and to acknowledge the real and fundamental rights of every person in this country to define our own destiny.”