Abortion foes often find it difficult to unite, but as they gathered for the March for Life the movement’s leaders uniformly backed a mid-pregnancy abortion ban they expected the House to pass this week.
But it was the members of Congress they’d helped to elect — and women, no less — who gummed things up.
The measure banning most abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy will still get a vote at some point, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers assured attendees at a Thursday rally before the march began. Dubbed the “pain-capable” bill, the measure is premised on the idea that a fetus can feel pain beyond that point in a pregnancy.
“I feel your frustration and disappointment that today we aren’t celebrating passage of the pain-capable bill … this bill represents a critical shift for the pro-life debate across the country because it makes clear the pain an unborn child feels is very real and very wrong,” said McMorris Rodgers, who’s the number four House Republican.
Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists have gathered every year for more than four decades to protest the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. They’ve been especially buoyed in recent years by a wave of abortion restrictions being passed across the country — including the 20-week ban, which has been passed by a dozen states.
This year they came to the nation’s capitol to cheer the federal version of the bill, which polls well among the public and is viewed as a more moderate restriction — only a sliver of abortions are performed past 20 weeks of pregnancy.
They’ve added more events around the protest in recent years, holding sessions on Wednesday where experts talked about pregnancy-related issues, like an unexpected prenatal diagnosis or respecting human life in all forms.
But they got a big disappointment Wednesday night, when House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told many of them personally that leadership had decided to table the bill last-minute and instead bring forth a bill blocking subsidized Obamacare plans from covering abortion.
Earlier that day, as House Republicans met in the basement of the Capitol building, Reps. Renee Ellmers, Marsha Blackburn, Ann Wagner and other female members told the group they needed to revamp the bill to make it more palatable to women and younger Americans — even though all three women had voted for the bill when the House first passed it a year and a half ago.
Some of the women called their colleagues “old, white men,” according to multiple accounts of the meeting.
They wanted to remove from the bill a requirement that says rape victims must report the crime before they may obtain an abortion. The bill would allow abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy only if a woman’s life was threatened or if she had been raped.
Typically when House Republicans fracture at the last minute, it’s over whether a bill was conservative enough. But in an unusual twist, this dispute was over whether it was moderate enough.
Lawmakers say they still expect to reach consensus on final language. But many who planned to vote on the bill in its current form expressed frustration at how the whole episode unfolded.
“It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that I wasn’t profoundly disappointed,” said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who is the bill’s primary sponsor.
Franks won’t yet say whether he would support removing the requirement to report rape. Despite his disappointment, he believes GOP leadership is committed to building consensus to a point where the bill will eventually pass.
“Everybody wants to write it a little differently,” Franks said. “But it was one of the most unique and opportune moments we’ve had in a long time, and while I am disappointed that we didn’t achieve it today, I am as committed as I’ve ever been in my life to protecting pain-capable unborn babies and their mothers.”
The dispute shows that Republicans are becoming more attuned to women, some members said. “The Republican Party needs to be open to the concerns of pro-life women, and I think that’s what we did last night,” said Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La.
Some anti-abortion groups were privately furious, as they’d helped to get the female members elected in the first place.
Ellmers, Blackburn and Wagner have all been endorsed in the past by the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that works to get anti-abortion women elected to public office. The group presented Blackburn with an award last year for her work on anti-abortion legislation.
But activists said they’re sure leadership will keep the 20-week ban a priority. South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham is sponsoring a version in the Senate, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he’ll bring it up for a vote at some point.
“I would say there’s a few members who I think were thoughtless but there are others who were sincere,” said Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America. “I think all that will get sorted out at the end of the day.”
