Senate Democrats continued pressing Republicans on reproductive rights this week as they returned to Washington and brought up a series of bills that would protect patients’ access to health care, including abortion and physicians’ ability to provide it. All of them failed.
“My Republican colleagues have a choice: Vote ‘yes’ and stand with women who want their rights protected, or stand with Donald Trump and MAGA radicals who want to see those rights taken away,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday on the Senate floor.
In the weeks ahead of the July 4 recess, Senate Democrats held a series of votes on bills related to abortion , contraception and assisted reproductive technologies , such as in vitro fertilization, or IVF. None garnered the 60 votes needed to proceed in the upper chamber, which currently has 47 Democrats, 49 Republicans and four political independents who typically align with the Democrats, giving them a de facto 51-49 majority.
This week, as Republicans prepare to hold their presidential nominating convention in Milwaukee, and on the heels of their release of a party platform that embraces categorizing fetuses and embryos as people , Democrats again forced their colleagues across the aisle to weigh in on policies they said are popular with the American people.
More than 60 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center . Two-thirds of Americans oppose classifying frozen embryos as people, a recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed. And according to FiveThirtyEight polling , 90 percent of Americans believe contraception, such as condoms and birth control pills, should be legal, while 81 percent said the same about intrauterine devices, or IUDs.
The Kaiser Family Foundation released polling on Wednesday showing that among Republican women voters, 79 percent support “laws protecting access to abortions for patients who are experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies” and 69 percent support “a federal law protecting access to abortions in the case of rape or incest in all states where abortion is banned.” While 57 percent of Republican women said they supported a federal law that limits abortion to before 15 weeks’ gestation, 45 percent supported one that guarantees a national right to abortion care.
“This is about freedom. We refuse to back down, we refuse to give up, we refuse to settle for a reality in which our daughters have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers. This may be our reality right now. But, colleagues, it does not have to be our future,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Wednesday on the Senate floor.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted down Democratic bills that would support training health care professionals in abortion, protect physicians who provide legal abortions from retaliation, and reinforce the right to travel across state lines to access reproductive health care. Each was brought up for a vote using a process known as unanimous consent, wherein a single objecting senator can stop it — in these cases, Republican Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas, Ted Budd of North Carolina and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, respectively.
Then, on Wednesday, Democrats brought up a nonbinding messaging bill that would have affirmed support for abortion and other reproductive health care. This one was done in a full recorded vote, requiring individual senators to state their positions. It failed, too, in a 49-to-44 vote, with Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska the only Republicans casting “yea” votes.
Ahead of the vote, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the bill’s lead sponsor, called it a “plain up or down vote on whether you support women being able to make their own reproductive health care decisions. It doesn’t force anything, doesn’t cost anything. It’s actually just a half-page bill simply saying that women should have the basic freedom to make their own decisions about their health care.”
Introduced last month by the Democratic women in the Senate, along with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the bill states in its entirety: “It is the sense of Congress that — (1) protections for access to abortion rights and other reproductive health care after the Dobbs v. Jackson, 597 U.S. 215 (2022) decision on June 24, 2022, should be supported; and (2) the protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) should be restored and built upon, moving towards a future where there is reproductive freedom for all.”
Reproductive rights have been in the political spotlight since June 2022, when the Supreme Court ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. Former president Donald Trump, who is again the presumptive Republican nominee, often touts his role in naming three of the conservative justices who decided the case. He told a Fox radio show on Wednesday that “the abortion issue is much simplified now” after regulation was returned to the states.
Abortion is now fully banned in 14 states and four more limit the procedure to six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant. Since Roe was overturned, abortion rights have won every time they were put directly before voters in the form of a ballot measure or initiative. “Everybody wanted this. Democrats, Republicans and all legal scholars wanted it,” Trump told Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade .
Democrats believe that the issue of abortion could bolster their chances in November, when roughly a third of the Senate is up for reelection, all House of Representatives seats are on the ballot and Trump is likely to again face Democratic President Joe Biden. Reproductive rights have become an issue on which the two political parties’ candidates are clearly divided, though views among voters are less black-and-white and more nuanced.
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