House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has condemned Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed anti-abortion legislation as the “clearest signal” yet of “extreme Maga Republicans’ intent to criminalise” healthcare for millions of Americans after the US Supreme Court revoked a constitutional right to abortion care.
Legislation proposed by the South Carolina Republican on 13 September would outlaw abortions nationwide at 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions only for pregnancies from rape or incest or to protect the life of the patient.
The bill reveals how Republicans “are gleefully charging ahead with their deadly crusade to punish and control women’s health decisions,” Speaker Pelosi said in a statement referencing Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, which Democratic officials have derided for the far-right agenda it embraces.
“We are already seeing the agonizing reality of the radical bans enacted by radical right-wing state legislatures – and extreme Maga Republicans in Congress clearly want to inflict this same suffering on every woman in every state,” she said.
At least 12 states have effectively outlawed abortion entirely following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization on 24 June, which struck down decades of precedents affirming the constitutional right to abortion care in Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey.
In the days and weeks after the ruling, Senator Graham and other Republican officials claimed that the Supreme Court ruling merely, and rightfully, returned the issue of abortion rights to individual states. But on Tuesday, the senator said explicitly that “we should have a law at the federal level” to ban abortion care.
Democratic officials have warned that the Supreme Court ruling would allow a Republican-controlled Congress to pass a nationwide ban on abortion, mirroring severe restrictions across the US, including lengthy prison sentences for providers and people who assist abortion care.
Senator Graham said his legislation would receive a vote on the Senate floor if Republicans take control of Congress after midterm elections.
“If we take back the House and the Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote,” he said on Tuesday. “If the Democrats are in charge, I don’t know if we’ll ever have a vote.”
The White House has firmly rejected the proposal, and President Joe Biden would likely veto such legislation if it ever passed through Congress.
“Instead of fighting actual crime, Republicans would drag doctors off to prison, while forcing ER physicians to focus on the threat of prosecution instead of the emergency medical care owed their patients,” according to Speaker Pelosi. “Meanwhile, House Republicans have overwhelmingly backed criminalising abortion nationwide, rejecting women’s right to travel for healthcare and even eliminating the right to birth control.”
Earlier this year, Republican senators blocked legislation that would have protected patients traveling across state lines to seek an abortion.
Senate Republicans also blocked a vote on a measure that would affirm Americans’ right to contraception, including oral birth control, intrauterine devices, or IUDs, and emergency contraception like the morning-after pill, as well as the right of physicians to provide them.
The House of Representatives, meanwhile, passed two bills aimed at protecting abortion access across the US in the chamber’s first legislative attempts to bolster reproductive healthcare and secure abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.
