Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Republicans had predicted that a “red wave” would help them take the Senate and hold a huge majority in the House. Obviously, that did not come to pass, and one major factor in the red wave becoming a light coral trickle—wherein Democrats retained the Senate and Republicans gained an extremely thin majority in the House—was abortion. Galvanized by the Supreme Court overturning 50 years of precedent in June and having no interest in putting people in power who wanted to further obliterate a pregnant person’s right to choose, voters came out in droves to make it clear that reproductive rights actually matter. Having had the last two months to reflect on the situation, has the GOP decided to listen?
No! Of course not! Instead, the party that spent last week underscoring that it is every bit the shit show people think it is has decided to use its first full week in power to vote on two antiabortion measures.
The first one, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, was reintroduced on Monday. What would the passage of this strangely named piece of legislation do? Imprison doctors for up to five years if they fail to resuscitate babies “born alive” after an attempted abortion, regardless of whether the procedure was performed due to fatal fetal abnormalities. As HuffPost notes, “the bill is chock-full of misinformation,” including the fact that, as actual doctors have pointed out, “it’s nearly impossible for infants to be born alive during abortions later in pregnancy.” Proponents of the Born-Alive act also fail to acknowledge that such a bill is entirely unnecessary for other reasons, like the fact that the rights of infants are already protected by a law passed more than 20 years ago. Also, as it happens, murder is illegal in the United States, so despite what antiabortion advocates may tell you, doctors aren’t going around killing newborns.
The second vote is on a resolution to formally condemn attacks on “pro-life facilities.” As Jezebel notes, it‘s not clear if there will also be a vote to condemn “actual violence at abortion clinics, including the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller and multiple more recent high-profile incidents of arson.” And by not clear, we obviously mean this will never happen.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace said of her colleagues: “We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week. Millions of women across the board were angry over overturning Roe v. Wade. What we’re doing this week is paying lip service to life. Nothing that we’re doing this week on protecting life is ever going to make it through the Senate.” She added that she’d like to see her party move in a more “centrist direction” on the issue of abortion, which is another thing that’s unlikely to happen in this lifetime, given the hundreds of Republicans who don’t even want to guarantee the right to birth control.
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In yet further—and arguably even more disturbing—abortion news, Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall said Tuesday that women in his state could be prosecuted for using abortion pills to end pregnancies. Asked by AL.com how this squares with Alabama’s Human Life Protection Act, which criminalizes abortion providers but specifically exempts people receiving abortions from criminal charges, he responded: “The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women ‘upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed’ from liability under the law. It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law—which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”
As AL.com notes, the state’s chemical endangerment law, passed in 2006, was created to “protect small children from fumes and chemicals from home-based meth labs” and was almost immediately used against women who took various types of drugs during pregnancy (including in cases in which the drugs they had taken were prescribed by doctors). As a result, people were being sent to prison after having miscarriages and stillbirths. Last week, the Justice Department said the US Postal Service can continue to deliver abortion pills anywhere in the country, regardless of the laws in the state where they are entering.
