As part of an anti-abortion rights effort, Republicans pushed through a bill laying out criminal penalties for doctors who fail to resuscitate babies born after an attempted abortion.
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Anti-abortion activists demonstrating outside the Supreme Court after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. The Republican Party’s conservative base has made opposition to abortion rights a litmus test.
WASHINGTON — Republicans used their new power in the House on Wednesday to push through legislation that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties, underscoring their opposition to abortion rights even as they stopped short of trying to ban the procedure.
The measure, the second policy bill Republicans have brought to the floor since taking control, has no chance of passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Its consideration was an early effort by the G.O.P. to appeal to its conservative base, which has made opposition to abortion rights a litmus test, without alienating a broader group of more moderate voters that recoiled last year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, helping Democrats hold off an expected red wave.
The House approved the bill on Wednesday almost entirely along party lines, on a vote of 220 to 210. One Democrat, Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, joined Republicans in favor and another, Representative Vicente Gonzalez, also of Texas, voted “present.” The bill would require that infants born alive after an attempted abortion receive the same protection under the law and degree of care as any newborn, and threaten medical providers with up to five years in prison for failing to resuscitate babies born alive during abortions.
Live births during an abortion procedure are exceedingly rare, experts said, and federal law already requires that a baby who survives an attempted abortion receive emergency medical care. The new bill would clarify the standard of care to which doctors are held and lay out penalties for violators. Policy organizations supporting abortion rights said the measure was an effort to discourage women from seeking abortions and doctors from performing them.
But Republicans framed the legislation as a way to protect the unborn, and sought to use it as a cudgel to portray Democratic opponents as unwilling to provide basic rights to newborns.
“A child who survives an abortion attempt, who is outside the womb, breathing and struggling for life, doesn’t deserve equal protection under the law?” said Representative Kat Cammack, Republican of Florida. “That shouldn’t be a controversial position.”
That was in many ways the point of the bill. Another piece of legislation Republicans have proposed in the past, which would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, is far more controversial and, based on the results of the midterm elections, could expose them to a political backlash.
Electing a New Speaker of the House
Representative Kevin McCarthy won the speakership after a revolt within the Republican Party set off a long stretch of unsuccessful votes.
- Inside the Speaker Fight: Mr. McCarthy’s speaker bid turned into a rolling disaster. “The Daily” has the inside story of how it went so wrong and what he was forced to give up.
- A Tenuous Grip: By making concessions to far-right representatives, Mr. McCarthy has effectively given them carte blanche to disrupt the workings of the House — and to hold him hostage to their demands.
- Looming Consequences: Congressional gridlock brought on by far-right Republicans now seems more likely to lead to government shutdowns or, worse, a default on debt obligations.
- Roots of the Chaos: How did Mr. McCarthy’s bid become a four-day debacle? The story begins with the zero-sum politics of Newt Gingrich.
On Wednesday, Democrats, many dressed in white, the color of the suffragist movement, described the abortion bill as part of a concerted effort by Republicans to end women’s access to the procedure.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Republicans in their first days in power had done “nothing on inflation, nothing on quality of life issues for the American people, nothing even on public safety.”
Instead, Mr. Jeffries said, “you come to the floor as part of your march to criminalize abortion care. To impose a nationwide ban. To set into motion government-mandated pregnancies.”
And some Democratic lawmakers shared deeply personal and tragic stories, warning that criminalizing abortions can have lethal consequences for women. On the House floor, Representative Frederica Wilson, Democrat of Florida, recounted what she said was one of the most painful episodes of her life, when the 7-month-old fetus in her belly stopped moving and was pronounced dead. But because Roe v. Wade had yet to establish abortion rights nationwide, state law barred the doctor from inducing labor.
“The corpse of that child was still within me,” she said. “My little body was wretched with pain, weakness and frailty.” She said she almost died, and went into labor at eight and a half months. “Oh, what pain. Oh, what grief,” she said, adding, “I beg you, I plead you — we can’t go back.”
The House also approved a measure condemning attacks on facilities, groups, and churches that oppose abortion rights. It too passed mostly along party lines, with Democrats noting that it did nothing to condemn violence or property crimes at facilities that help women seeking abortions.
Earlier in the week, as part of a new rules package for how the chamber will operate, House Republicans also pushed through a measure to speed consideration of legislation permanently blocking the use of federal funds for abortions. That prohibition, known as the Hyde Amendment, has for decades been implemented on an annual basis through government spending bills.
But the legislation imposing new criminal penalties for failure to care for a baby born after an attempted abortion sparked the most heated debate on the House floor. Republicans described grisly abortion stories, while Democrats accused them of spreading fear to score political points.
The point for Republicans, said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California Davis School of Law who specializes in the politics of reproductive health, was to make abortion seem universally unacceptable.
She also said the measure was little more than a messaging exercise, since the surgical method typically used to perform an abortion after the first trimester, known as dilation and evacuation, makes the odds of a live birth negligible. The vast majority of abortions in the United States occur in the first trimester, before the point of fetal viability, which is currently at about 23 weeks.
In the exceedingly rare case in which a baby is born after an attempted abortion, it is highly unlikely that the infant would be able to survive outside the womb. In such cases, doctors would likely have induced labor as a means of terminating a nonviable pregnancy. Such cases present wrenching choices for women, and experts say they should be handled on a case-by-base basis. Under the bill, a doctor helping a woman decide what to do in such circumstances would be doing so under the threat of criminal prosecution.
Some Republicans said they were uncomfortable with the legislation.
Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, said she was frustrated that her party had chosen to begin its first full week in power highlighting the issue of abortion.
“I’ve questioned leadership about it,” Ms. Mace said in an interview. “This was not a winning message for us in the midterm elections. We need to show compassion to women and compassion to the right to life. This doesn’t do it.”
“There is no way this doesn’t hurt us,” she said of the legislation, noting that “a vast majority” in her district did not support overturning Roe v. Wade.
Still, in a reflection of the political risks for Republicans in breaking with anti-abortion rights forces, Ms. Mace voted for both measures.
The bill was part of an effort by Republicans to turn the tables on Democrats in the abortion debate, portraying them as the extremists rather than the other way around. But it was not clear that the strategy could work in a post-Roe world, where Republican-controlled statehouses have been pushing ahead with abortion bans and the party’s stance against abortion access is clear.
A similar “born alive” measure was recently rejected by voters in Montana, as critics of the measure argued that the proposed amendment was unnecessary and that infanticide was already illegal in the state.
The vote came a little more than a week before the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which was overturned by the Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Anti-abortion activists, who will hold the annual March for Life in Washington next week, celebrated the bill’s passage in the House, despite its dim prospects for enactment.
“We thank G.O.P. leadership for recognizing the federal government’s crucial role in protecting our most vulnerable children and their mothers in the Dobbs era,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
Abortion rights activists said the fact that Republicans wanted to take up the bills showed the power those groups have over their elected officials.
“They know that a 20-week ban, as any other ban, is untenable,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications and research for NARAL Pro-Choice America. “They’re hoping to get some small win here. It really is about restoring some faith in the party from the extremist anti-choice organizations who have been demanding more regulations. It shows who is pulling the strings.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Pam Belluck contributed reporting.
Source: nytimes.com
