By the time they arrived on the National Mall to protest the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, participants in Thursday’s March for Life had already gotten a rude surprise.
House Republicans had planned to vote on a bill much like the ones recently passed in several states, to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The bill was abruptly dropped after Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., who defeated a Democratic incumbent in 2014, began lobbying colleagues against it and apparently changing minds.
It was a strange development, given that both she and some of the members she convinced had voted for the same bill in 2013.
This law would have at least brought the U.S. closer to the rest of the civilized world. After Roe, which struck down virtually all abortion laws, America became the wild west of abortion. Only now are conservative U.S. states passing twenty-week restrictions — still far more liberal than those crafted by many left-leaning and socialist governments in Europe. In Spain, abortion is permitted only until the fourteenth week; in France and Germany, only until the twelfth week.
Americans strongly approve of 20-week restrictions. A Quinnipiac Poll from November told respondents it would “ban virtually all abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases of rape and incest that are reported to authorities.” It found that sixty percent of respondents supported this, with only 33 percent opposed. Democrats were evenly split on the question.
And so the congressional GOP leadership agreed to bring the bill to the floor. It was then that Ellmers began working against it. She would later claim she would have voted for the bill even without the changes she wanted, but this was after she had sown enough doubt that the House leadership withdrew it for lack of votes. For conservatives, let it be a lesson that undermining party leadership is not a good in itself.
As reported by the Washington Examiner, Ellmers tried to explain herself by citing the requirement that rapes would have to be reported to the authorities before they could be used to justify abortions after the fifth month. To be clear, the bill contains no reporting requirement up to the fifth month of pregnancy. Rape victims in that situation would not be required to prove that a crime occurred.
Ellmers worried that this could “come off as harsh and judgmental.” She admitted to having voted for the bill with exactly the same provision in 2013, but said that at the time this “wasn’t evident in the base language of the bill.” The language in that earlier bill seems clear enough to us. Much less clear is what benefit Ellmers believes she or other Republicans can derive by repudiating something they can already be attacked for voting for earlier — especially now that she has made an issue of it.
In 2014, the incumbent Ellmers won a decisive but not comfortable (59 to 41 percent) primary election against a weak, immigration-obsessed opponent whom she outspent nearly 13-to-1. If she feared this now-scuttled bill was “harsh and judgmental,” wait until voters in her safe Republican district choose between her and a plausible, well-funded opponent.
