Rep. Trent Franks views the vote as a beginning. House OKs 20-week abortion ban bill

The House Tuesday passed a bill that would ban most abortions nationwide after 20 weeks. The most far-reaching abortion legislation in the House in a decade, it was passed 228-196, mostly along party lines.

The vote is largely symbolic: The bill will be dead on arrival in the Senate. And the White House has already threatened to veto the “fetal pain” legislation, which is based on the controversial assertion that a fetus can feel pain at that stage of development.


But Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), the bill’s sponsor, didn’t find that discouraging. He pointed to the most recent time Congress passed an abortion bill of this scope, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. That bill fell short and faced court battles before it finally became law.

“I think if you hearken back to partial-birth abortion … everybody said you know, it’s not constitutional, it can’t pass, it can’t go anywhere, and it took time to do that and it even had to succeed a presidential veto. But it eventually did,” Franks said.

In pushing the legislation forward, Republicans are issuing a rallying cry for their base still fighting Roe v. Wade 40 years later. Similar fetal pain bills have passed in nearly a dozen states, although some have been challenged in court.

Anti-abortion Republicans are hoping to capitalize on public outrage about Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial, which captured national headlines. Franks’s original bill was crafted to outlaw late term abortions in Washington, D.C., and it failed in the House last year under a procedure that needed a two-thirds vote for passage. But the Gosnell verdict sparked outrage and reinvigorated activists, and a few days after the conviction Franks broadened his legislation to apply nationwide.

Opposing it, Democrats supporting abortion rights are stoking liberal anger over the “war on women” and chiding the GOP for spending its time on a divisive social agenda instead of focusing on jobs. They said the bill is unconstitutional and distracting.

“Now I thought we had established this last fall with the election. Americans are tired of Congress taking up extreme and divisive legislation targeted at women’s health,” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said at a press conference. “Unfortunately, many of our Republican colleagues didn’t seem to have gotten that message last November.”

Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) told reporters, “It’s a bill that will go absolutely nowhere.”

“It’s another opportunity for us to do less than we ought to be doing for the American people. We really ought to be talking job creation, getting our economy going and finding a solution to student loan interest rates that will double,” he said.

Democrats also pointed out that the Republican members who voted to pass the bill out of committee were all men, and sought to connect Franks’s comment last week that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low” with former Rep. Todd Akin’s remark last year about “legitimate rape,” which sunk his Missouri Senate bid and reverberated through the 2012 campaign.

Franks later tried to clarify his comments, saying he had been referring to pregnancies from rape that result in abortion after the sixth month of pregnancy.

But he was replaced as floor manager on his own bill by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). And a rape and incest exception was quietly added to the bill last week, though it did not satisfy Democrats and women’s health groups, which objected to its requirement that rape or incest had been reported to authorities.

In a battle between the two parties over who would be the face of the debate, Democrats made Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) floor manager, instead of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.).

House leadership has been relatively restrained on this issue. Speaker John Boehner also held a press conference Tuesday morning — but his was focused on student loans, not abortion. But after the vote, he released a statement saying, “The recent conviction of Kermit Gosnell shed the light of intense public scrutiny on the gruesome practice of late-term abortion. This bill, which extends protection of unborn babies beyond the 20-week mark, is the most significant pro-life legislation to come before Congress since enactment of the ban on partial-birth abortions.”

Franks said he was glad Blackburn was taking the lead on the bill.

“We wanted to have as many women voices speaking to the bill, because the other side has tried to talk about everything but the bill. They’ve injected false issues, they’ve said it’s all men, they’ve said all these things that are really ancillary issues,” he said. “They haven’t addressed the bill directly, and the bill simply protects mothers and their unborn children from the beginning of the sixth month on from monsters like Kermit Gosnell.”

Eleven states have passed similar “fetal pain” laws. But women’s health groups argue that the laws are patently unconstitutional, because they directly conflict with Supreme Court precedent that says states can’t outlaw abortions prior to viability, which is now usually considered to be around 23 to 24 weeks into a pregnancy.

Some of those laws — including one in Franks’s home state Arizona — are currently blocked in court. Arkansas and North Dakota have gone further, banning abortion after 12 weeks and six weeks, respectively, though Arkansas’s law is currently blocked in court, and women’s health groups have vowed to challenge North Dakota’s.

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