This afternoon, the House of Representatives voted on two Democratic abortion bills: the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) and the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act (EAAA). The WHPA, which would effectively codify legal abortion up until the point of birth, has been a major Democratic initiative for more than a year — it passed the House on a party-line vote last fall, with the support of every Democrat except for Henry Cuellar (D., Texas), but failed by a margin of 46–48 in the Senate. The EAAA, a newer bill introduced by Democrats in the wake of Dobbs, focuses on restricting states’ ability to regulate abortion in a variety of important ways — most notably, preventing states from blocking residents’ ability to receive abortions in other states, and banning state legislatures’ ability to outlaw abortion pills if those pills are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. (The Biden administration has already signaled its plans to weaponize FDA approval in the post-Dobbs abortion-pill fight.)
These two partisan, radically pro-abortion bills, then, aim to circumvent the Constitution — and state legislatures — in an effort to throw the Roe-era abortion regime a lifeline. As Rep. Dan Bishop (R., N.C.) aptly noted in his statement on the votes: “The former bill [WHPA] would allow abortion for all nine months of pregnancy with zero restrictions, and the latter [EAAA] would block states from banning abortifacients, including chemical abortion pills. Both bills would remove power from the people and their elected state representatives to set their own laws blocking abortion.” One would hope that every Republican would be smart enough to see that.
And yet, three Republican congressmen — Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — voted for the EAAA. All three are moderates, but have, at varying junctures, presented themselves as at least nominally pro-life. Fitzpatrick has backed efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and a 20-week abortion ban. As for Kinzinger and Upton, both of whom are retiring, the former has described himself as “pro-life” and was given an “A” rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life for America, and the latter’s website declares that “we must . . . protect the sanctity of human life and prevent the misuse of federal taxpayer dollars for abortion.”
It’s unclear how ostensibly pro-life Republicans, with their previous rhetorical nods to “the sanctity of human life,” can justify their support for a bill that is not just pro-abortion on the merits, but an affront to the basic constitutional principle of federalism. If Fitzpatrick, Kinzinger, and Upton — whether in or outside of Congress — want to make nice with the abortion lobby, they’re free to do so. But after votes like today’s, they shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously by pro-lifers.