Faced with a party-wide “meltdown” over young female voters just as they are taking control of Congress, Republicans saw their first major assault on abortion access collapse after a late-night, last-minute meeting on Wednesday. But the GOP woke up on Thursday to pro-lifers marching on Washington, a new anti-abortion bill and conservative attacks on rising women of the right looking to gain a foothold in a war for – rather than on – women.
House members were due to vote on Thursday for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have instituted a national ban on abortions in the 20th week of pregnancy and later. The legislation was expected to pass easily, as a similar ban did in 2013. But dissent from some of the party’s women drove the bill off the docket.
In the days leading up to the vote, Representative Renee Ellmers of North Carolina had said she opposed the bill, as did second-year congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana. Their rumblings helped provoke a meeting on Wednesday night with the House majority whip, Steve Scalise, and at least 10 other female Republican representatives. The GOP dropped the measure shortly after.
The dissenters’ key contention with the bill was a provision insisting that only rape victims who had reported to police would be exempt from the 20-week ban.
“The issue becomes, we’re questioning the woman’s word,” Ellmers said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We have to be compassionate to women when they’re in a crisis situation.”
Even though Ellmers said on Wednesday she would vote in favor of the ban, anti-choice activists had scheduled a rally outside her office on Thursday. Many conservatives saw her support as waffling, with the influential commentator Erick Erickson accusing Ellmers of being “[a]gainst the bill before she was for the bill, but only then after she ensured it would not pass”.
Ellmers, previously best known for having defeated the American Idol contestant Clay Aiken on her way to Washington, insisted on Twitter that she remains “a strong defender of the #prolife community”. But she and Republican strategists have expressed as much concern as Democrats have reveled in glee over how reproductive issues look to millennial voters. “[S]ocial issues just aren’t as important” to young voters, Ellmers told National Journal last week.
Seeking to hold on to its majority in Congress and with the party’s potential 2016 presidential candidates already meeting each other, the GOP has been aggressively strategizing on how to win over twenty- and thirtysomethings.
Despite these concerns, the 20-week ban vote was timed for the same day as the March for Life, an annual anti-choice demonstration that takes place on the anniversary of the landmark US supreme court decision in Roe v Wade – which determined that women have a fundamental right to decide whether or not to have an abortion.
Instead of voting on the 20-week ban, Republican lawmakers on Thursday will acknowledge the Roe v Wade anniversary with a bill that blocks federal funding for abortions. The legislation is significantly less contentious, in part because such funding is already tightly restricted. The White House said on Thursday that it would recommend Obama veto the abortion funding bill as well.
The funding bill also includes a provision to undo a part of the Affordable Care Act that grants tax credits to small businesses that provide abortion coverage in their healthcare plans, according to the Huffington Post.
Republican representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts told the Hill that the late-night rollback of the 20-week ban, introduced on the first day of the congressional session, was caused by “a meltdown” inside the party. Others said a vote on the 20-week ban was simply being delayed – pointing to a potential re-emergence on the House floor later in the term.
President Barack Obama issued a veto threat against the 20-week bill on Tuesday, hours before his State of the Union address. “Surely we can agree it’s a good thing that teen pregnancies and abortions are nearing all-time lows,” he said during the speech, “and that every woman should have access to the healthcare that she needs.”
With little chance of getting past the president’s desk, the 20-week ban was seen as a signal of the Republicans’ political priorities now that they are in control of Congress. In the Republican rebuttal to Obama’s address, the Iowa senator Joni Ernst said that among the party’s priorities is to “defend life”.
Ilyse Hogue, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said she was happy about the GOP’s decision to drop the bill, but condemned the party for issuing legislation that alienates “women and young voters” in the US.
“I never thought I would see the day that the Tea Party-led House of Representatives would wake up to the fact that their priorities – outright abortion bans – are way out of touch with the American people,” said Hogue. “The GOP drafted a bill so extreme and so out of touch with the voters that even their own membership could not support.”
Even though the ban has been indefinitely postponed at the federal level, laws restricting abortion access are running rampant in state legislatures. Similar 20-week bans to the one introduced in the House have been proposed by bills in West Virginia and South Carolina.
States have adopted 231 new restrictions on abortion access since the 2010 midterm elections, according to a report released earlier this month by reproductive research group The Guttmacher Institute.
