WASHINGTON – Republicans used their new power in the House on Wednesday to push through legislation that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties, underscoring their opposition to abortion rights even as they stopped short of trying to ban the procedure.
The measure, the second policy Bill Republicans have brought to the floor since taking control, has no chance of passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Its consideration was an early effort by the GOP to appeal to its conservative base, which has made opposition to abortion rights a litmus test, without alienating a broader group of more moderate voters that recoiled in 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, helping Democrats hold off an expected red wave.
The House approved the Bill on Wednesday almost entirely along party lines, on a vote of 220-210. One Democrat, Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, joined Republicans in favour.
The Bill would require that infants born alive after an attempted abortion receive the same protection under the law and degree of care as any newborn, and threaten medical providers with up to five years in prison for failing to resuscitate babies born alive during abortions.
Live births during an abortion procedure are exceedingly rare, experts said, and federal law already requires that a baby who survives an attempted abortion receive emergency medical care.
The new Bill would clarify the standard of care to which doctors are held and lay out penalties for violators.
Policy organisations supporting abortion rights said the measure was an effort to discourage women from seeking abortions and doctors from performing them.
But Republicans framed the legislation as a way to protect the unborn and sought to use it as a cudgel to portray Democratic opponents as unwilling to provide basic rights to newborns.
“A child who survives an abortion attempt, who is outside the womb, breathing and struggling for life, doesn’t deserve equal protection under the law?” said Representative Kat Cammack. “That shouldn’t be a controversial position.”
That was in many ways the point of the Bill. Another piece of legislation Republicans have proposed in the past, which would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, is far more controversial and, based on the results of the midterm elections, could expose them to a political backlash.
On Wednesday, Democrats, many dressed in white, the colour of the suffragist movement, described the abortion Bill as part of a concerted effort by Republicans to end women’s access to the procedure.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, said Republicans in their first days in power had done “nothing on inflation, nothing on quality-of-life issues for the American people, nothing even on public safety”.
Instead, Mr Jeffries said, “you come to the floor as part of your march to criminalise abortion care, to impose a nationwide ban, to set into motion government-mandated pregnancies”. NYTIMES
