Susan Collins Working on Alternative to House Democrats’ ‘Contraception’ Bill
The Collins bill seeks to maintain ‘protections for religious liberties,’ but it’s unclear whether the final product would remove all the poison pills.
The Collins bill seeks to maintain ‘protections for religious liberties,’ but it’s unclear whether the final product would remove all the poison pills in the Democrats’ version.
H ouse Democrats passed a “contraception” bill on Thursday that all but a handful of House Republicans opposed because it would override the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), would prohibit laws and regulations defunding Planned Parenthood, and could create a federal right to the abortion drug used during the first ten weeks of pregnancy.
But in the Senate, Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, is working on an alternative bill that would codify into federal law the right to contraception first established by the Supreme Court in 1965. “Senator Collins supports federal protections for contraception access, and she’s working on a bill with Senators Kaine, Murkowski, and Sinema that would codify the right to use contraception first recognized by the Supreme Court in Griswold, while also maintaining protections for religious liberties,” Collins communications director Annie Clark told National Review in an email.
Although Collins and Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski support a right to abortion — they’re the only Republican senators who do — they opposed a Democratic bill to “codify Roe” because that bill went beyond Roe by superseding RFRA and prohibiting parental-consent abortion laws, among other provisions. As a Collins–Murkowski press release about the Democrats’ abortion bill noted, “Congress has never before adopted legislation that contains an exemption” to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Collins and Murkowski introduced their own bill to enshrine in federal law Roe’s expansive right to abortion in all 50 states; no other Senate Republicans signed on to that bill.
Not a single state has tried to ban contraception since 1965, when Griswold v. Connecticut was decided, and pro-life congressional Republicans have repeatedly voted for billions of dollars in federal funding for contraception in the Title X and Medicaid programs. There is no doubt that contraception will continue to be legal in every state and funded by the federal government. But pro-life legislators would oppose any bill that tramples on conscience rights, ensures taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood (America’s largest abortion provider), or creates a federal right to the abortion drug commonly used during the first ten weeks of pregnancy.
It remains to be seen whether the Collins alternative would remove all the poison pills that were in the House Democrats’ version. Despite those measures in the Democrats’ contraception bill, President Biden and other Democrats in Washington have feigned ignorance about why almost all House Republicans voted against it.
“OK, so not only do Republicans want to institute a federal ban on abortion, but today 195 of them voted against codifying the right to contraception,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet. “This was not a ‘gotcha’ bill with a bunch of stuff btw. It was pretty straightforward.”
The bill was of course anything but straightforward, and that’s one reason why Democrats skipped the usual committee hearing and brought the bill to a vote before the whole House a little less than one week after text of the bill began circulating in the Capitol.