The Republican-led House on Wednesday pressed ahead with a pair of anti-abortion measures, despite warning signs that the issue had galvanized the opposition in the wake of the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade last year.
Voting mostly along party lines, Republicans first approved a bill that would compel doctors to provide care for an infant who survives an attempted abortion – an occurrence that is exceedingly rare.
After its passage, Republicans broke into applause on the House floor as the bill’s sponsor, congresswoman Ann Wagner, a Republican of Missouri, waved the text of the legislation in celebration.
Democrats, several of them wearing white in protest, remained silent. However, on the measure, two Texas Democrats broke with the party: the congressman Henry Cuellar, who opposes abortion, supported it while his colleague Vicente González voted present.
The House also passed a non-binding resolution condemning attacks on pregnancy crisis centers, with the support of all Republicans and three Democrats.
The proposals, among the first moves made by Republicans’ new, narrow House majority, are unlikely to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate. But their passage will provide the Republican majority an opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with Democrats on the issue of abortion ahead of the 2024 elections.
“I am proud that Republicans are following through on the promises that we made to the American people,” the majority leader, Steve Scalise, the second-highest-ranking House Republican and a staunch anti-abortion advocate, told reporters this week. “All life is sacred and must be protected.”
Anti-abortion groups have long pushed so-called “born alive” legislation similar to the version under consideration in the House, which could carry a prison sentence of up to five years for medical workers.
Critics, including medical professionals, say such measures are based on distortions and misinformation about what is often an extremely painful and often unwanted decision to end a pregnancy. Abortions after the point of viability, which is defined as about 23 weeks, are extremely uncommon, according to federal and state data. In the rare instances they do happen, they often involve serious fetal abnormalities or risks to the life of the mother.
Moreover, opponents say newborns are already protected by a bipartisan law passed in 2002, which established full legal rights for infants born at any stage of development.
In a floor speech, Jerry Nadler, a Democrat of New York, said the measure “does nothing new to protect infants” but neither was it “harmless”.
“The bill directly interferes with a doctor’s medical judgment and dictates a medical standard of care that may not be appropriate in all circumstances, which could, in fact, put infants’ lives at greater risk,” Nadler said.
Abortion rights advocates also reacted to the bill. “Let’s be clear: doctors are already required to provide appropriate medical care by law,” Jacqueline Ayers, a senior vice-president at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “This is not how medical care works. It’s wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous to suggest otherwise.”
But Wagner, who has repeatedly championed the measure, argued, without evidence, that additional protections for infants born after abortion attempts were necessary because “many of these sweet little ones are denied the medical care they need to survive and thrive”.
Public support for abortion rights has climbed since the supreme court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion last summer. In November, voters punished Republicans for building the conservative court that overturned Roe. Despite rampant inflation and Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, Democrats defied expectations in November, keeping control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House, where their razor-thin majority is already proving to be a challenge.
Efforts to restrict abortion have even been met with fierce resistance in traditionally Republican states. In Montana, a conservative western state, voters rejected an initiative related to infants born after attempted abortions that is similar to the one House Republicans passed on Wednesday.
Abortion remains a top concern among conservative Republicans and anti-abortion activists alarmed by the backlash to the supreme court decision. Yet the early focus on abortion has given some Republicans in swing districts cause for concern.
“We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week. Millions of women across the board were angry over overturning Roe v Wade,” Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
Noting that the bills had little chance of becoming law, she called the move “tone-deaf” and said Republicans were merely “paying lip-service to life”.
“If you want to make a difference and reduce the number of abortions with a Democratic-controlled Senate, the No 1 issue we should be working on is access to birth control,” she said. Nevertheless, Mace voted for the bills alongside her party.
Republicans also advanced a resolution, which carries no legislative weight, condemning violence against “pro-life facilities, groups and churches” which drew Democratic opposition because of its failure to address the threats targeting women’s healthcare clinics and abortion providers.
“By ignoring these acts of violence, Republicans are sending a very dangerous message that will only embolden the extremists behind them,” said Diana DeGette, a Democrat of Colorado and co-chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus.
Speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote, DeGette urged Republicans instead to adopt a counter-resolution that would condemn acts of political violence in any form.
Republicans, arguing in favor of the resolution, said anti-abortion groups had become targets of political violence since the supreme court’s June decision, and denounced the department of justice’s response to these attacks as inadequate.
“This resolution is very simple and its language is clear,” said Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, who has been critical of what he says is evidence of political bias within federal law enforcement against anti-abortion groups. “It also calls upon the Biden administration to take action now to bring the perpetrators to justice. Who could be opposed to that?”
In a statement, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, affirmed that the bills were “doomed” in the Senate, where he said Democrats would act as a “firewall against this extreme anti-choice Maga Republican agenda”.
“Just months after a historically disappointing midterm election, the Maga Republican-controlled House is putting on full display their truly extreme views on women’s health with legislation that does not have the support of the American people,” Schumer said ahead of the House vote. “Once again, Republicans are proving how dangerously out of touch they are with mainstream America.”
Reproductive rights activists won another political victory this week in Virginia, where abortion was at the center of a closely watched state senate race. Democrats flipped the seat, a result that will probably prevent the state legislature from enacting a 15-week abortion ban backed by the state’s conservative governor, Glenn Youngkin.
