Democrats dig in on abortion rights as Trump pushes for 20-week ban

By | February 12, 2020

House Democrats are backing legislation that would gut abortion restrictions just over one week after President Trump called on Congress to pass a 20-week abortion ban.

If the bill Democrats will review in a hearing Wednesday, the Women’s Health Protection Act, were to become law, then no states would be able to pass bans based on gestational stage such as the one Trump is calling for. The bill isn’t likely to get traction in the Republican-controlled Senate but is meant to draw attention to red-state laws regulating abortion.

“States and local governments have passed hundreds of bans and restrictions that make access to reproductive healthcare services, including abortion, increasingly difficult and, in some cases, impossible to obtain,” Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone and Anna Eshoo said when they announced the hearings.

This March, the Supreme Court is set to review the constitutionality of one such restriction in Louisiana, which requires doctors to be able to check patients into hospitals should something go wrong during an abortion procedure — even though reported instances of complications are rare. Other restrictions require women to wait between a first appointment and an abortion, mandate ultrasounds, or require doctors to read a script to patients about abortion risks even if they think the information they’re providing is incorrect.

Democrats want to do away with all restrictions and to enshrine into federal law the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which widely legalized abortion nationwide.

Wednesday’s hearing is just the latest offshoot of the abortion debate in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail: Democrats have aligned with the abortion rights movement, which has pushed for abortion to be allowed at any time during a pregnancy without restrictions. Republicans and anti-abortion advocates who wish to see abortion become illegal in most or all cases have focused their legislative efforts on banning abortions late in pregnancy.

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On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about a bill that would penalize doctors who do not transfer a baby to a hospital if the baby is born alive after an abortion is attempted late in pregnancy.

The bill already received a vote in the Senate this Congress and failed. Democrats said they opposed the bill, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, because it would impose rules on doctors caring for women who terminate a pregnancy when they find out they would otherwise give birth to a baby with a serious deformity or terminal illness.

“There frankly are just no good options. For those families, I trust parents to make those decisions together with their medical providers,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of National Women’s Law Center, said as part of her testimony at Tuesday’s Senate hearing.

In opposing the Senate bill, Democrats also point to the case of Kermit Gosnell, a former doctor who was convicted of murder for killing babies born alive after abortion attempts, to say that the current laws in place are already adequate at targeting those guilty of infanticide. States passed many of the restrictions that the Democratic House is seeking to undo as a result of the Gosnell case, with anti-abortion advocates saying they would improve women’s safety and critics saying they are burdensome and would cause clinics to close.

There isn’t robust data on why women have late-pregnancy abortions. Just over 1% of abortions, between 9,000 and 11,000 abortions a year, happen 21 weeks or later into a pregnancy. It’s not clear what percent of late-pregnancy abortions happen because a fetus wouldn’t be viable, because a woman would otherwise die, or because a woman tried to have an abortion earlier but was blocked by state restrictions. The available data also doesn’t show the extent to which women are changing their minds about giving birth or are coerced into it by family members or a partner.

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Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican who led the Senate hearing Tuesday, accused Democrats of talking past the subject of the panel when they said the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection bill was aimed at chipping away at abortion rights in general and when they talked about circumstances in which wanted pregnancies were terminated.

“This hearing is about making sure that every newborn baby has a fighting chance whether she’s born in a labor and delivery ward or whether she’s born in an abortion clinic,” he said. According to the Family Research Council, which opposes abortion, eight states have required reporting cases in which babies are born alive following an attempted abortion, and 170 cases have been reported, though it’s not clear what the circumstances were.

Polling from Gallup and the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that most voters want abortion to remain legal but also favor some limits. Anti-abortion advocates know most voters don’t support abortion late in pregnancy and are looking to get Democrats on the record about the issue leading up to the 2020 election as they canvass in states.

On the abortion rights side, advocates have decried new laws in GOP-controlled states, all of which have been blocked by courts, that would ban abortion after six weeks into a pregnancy. Because many women don’t know at that point that they are pregnant, they say the efforts show GOP lawmakers ultimately want to ban abortion outright.

Abortion rights advocates have encouraged women to talk about their abortions as a way to try to change people’s views on the issue. In the Senate hearing, Erika Christensen talked about an abortion she had late in her pregnancy that required her to fly to Colorado because she would otherwise have given birth to a baby who couldn’t breathe. Christensen, whose story swayed lawmakers and thereby helped to loosen abortion restrictions in New York, warned senators that their bill would have caused her baby to have been subject to “extreme measures … despite the futility of such measures.”

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A witness at Wednesday’s House hearing, Holly Alvarado, will share during prepared remarks how she faced “burdensome and medically unnecessary restrictions” when she sought an abortion while in the Air Force. To have her abortion, she had to drive four hours to another state, undergo an ultrasound, and wait three days between appointments.

“I never wanted to be pregnant. I never wanted to travel to Minnesota. I never wanted to jump through all the hoops to obtain an abortion, but I knew that I did not want this pregnancy and ultimately knew this was the right decision for my life,” Alvarado is expected to say Wednesday.

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