Senate Democrats plan to gin up the abortion issue as the nation nears the second anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in an effort to win voters in potentially crucial swing states.
“Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is planning to zero in on reproductive rights next month,” Axios reported. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), the No. 3 Senate Democrat, said, “We are certainly going to be talking a lot about [abortion].”
“I imagine that there’ll be some more policy legislation that will be discussed — whether it’s on the floor or through committee gatherings,” Sen. Ben Ray Lújan (D-NM) echoed.
Democrats went on the attack after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in mid-February that embryos are children, thus imperiling the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Within a week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) introduced the ‘‘Access to Family Building Act,’” which would protect the right to IVF treatment; she asked for a unanimous consent vote on her bill, which could have let the bill evade the normal process of review. The bill was blocked by Senate Republicans, who felt the legislation was too broad.
“If passed, the AFBA would give any adult the statutory right to create a child using any reproductive technology, including the cloning and genetic editing made possible by CRISPR,” the Heritage Foundation noted. “Indeed, the bill ‘pre-empt[s] any state effort to limit such access,’ meaning that states would be helpless to pass common-sense regulations for IVF that guard against ethical abuses. Colorado’s prohibition on anonymous gamete donation and Louisiana’s embryo protection law, for example, would be in jeopardy if Duckworth’s bill becomes law.”
But the Alabama GOP-dominated legislature then passed a bill in early March, signed by Governor Kay Ivey, that protected in vitro fertilization providers from any potential legal liability, making it a moot issue.
On Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) introduced the IVF Protection Act. An interviewer for Bloomberg asked them why they were introducing a national bill after the Alabama legislature had effectively blocked the state’s Supreme Court ruling. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen a number of people try to fearmonger on this very issue,” Britt responded, referring to the Democrats’ response to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling. “And so Ted and I came together and we believe this effort should be bi-partisan.”
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Cruz then said of Duckworth’s bill, “That bill is a different bill. That bill really seeks to backdoor in broader abortion legislation, which is where the Democratic are, but that’s not IVF … It was ostensibly about IVF, but it was written to give the federal government authority over abortion, potentially to strike down laws governing abortion in states all across the country. I get that’s the Democrats’ agenda.”