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Susan Collins Slams Dems’ Latest Attempt To Codify Roe V. Wade

   DailyWire.com
Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, speaks to members of the media following a meeting in the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, not pictured, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, July 28, 2021. Senators negotiating the terms of a $579 billion infrastructure plan chipped away at some of the issues that had been holding up an agreement but have yet to find a breakthrough on other differences that would seal an agreement and lead to a vote on legislation. Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg
Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) might be a pro-choice Republican, but that does not mean she supports the Democratic Party’s latest attempt to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.

On Wednesday, Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that the Senate would vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA). That act “would establish a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in all 50 states,” National Review reported.

On Thursday, Collins told media reporters that she has serious concerns about the bill.

“It supersedes all other federal and state laws, including the conscience protections that are in the Affordable Care Act,” Collins lamented.

“It doesn’t protect the right of a Catholic hospital to not perform abortions. That right has been enshrined in law for a long time,” she also explained.

For his part, Schumer denied that the bill would force Catholic hospitals to provide abortions.

“Some are saying that this legislation would tell hospitals — certain religious hospitals — that they have to perform abortions,” Schumer said on Thursday. “That is simply not true. This bill simply gives providers the statutory right to provide abortion care without medically unnecessary restrictions. That’s plain and simple. So, this rumor is false.”

The House version of the bill H.R. 2975, which passed last September, does indeed imply that Catholic doctors who do not perform abortions could lose access to public funds.

“Under H.R. 2975, doctors and nurses who conscientiously refuse to participate in abortion could lose their jobs and Catholic and other religious hospitals could be forced to provide abortions or lose public funds,” The Charlotte Lozier Institute reported at the time.

“Section 4(a)(10) creates a statutory right to provide an abortion without any limitation ‘on a health care provider’s ability to provide immediate abortion services when that health care provider believes, based on the good-faith medical judgment of the provider, that delay would pose a risk to the patient’s health,'” Lozier explained.

“As defined in Section 3(2), the term ‘health care provider’ includes entities as well as individuals,” the research non-profit continued. “Laws that prohibit hospitals and other entities from discriminating against doctors and nurses who conscientiously refuse to participate in abortion would fail under H.R. 2975 if the entity health care provider could show that such laws limit its ability to provide ‘immediate’ abortion services and it believes based on it.”

National Review also noted that the House version of the bill “is doomed in the Democratic Senate. It has the support of only 48 or 49 senators.”

Collins, as well as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), have introduced their own bill that is a weakened version of the WHPA. But that bill also is unlikely to pass, National Review noted.

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