On the home page, I take a look at why Democrats missed opportunities to enshrine in federal law a right to abortion when they held huge majorities in Congress at the start of both the Clinton and Obama presidencies:
Some reporters and pundits have said that Democrats in Congress simply lacked the votes to ever enshrine in federal statute a right to abortion. But a closer look at the last two unified Democratic governments — the first under the Clinton presidency in 1993 and 1994 and the second under the Obama presidency in 2009 and 2010 — shows there very likely were congressional majorities in support of a federal right to abortion. There just weren’t enough votes to enshrine a right as expansive as the one that activists wanted.
After Democrats swept to power in 1992, the same year that the Supreme Court upheld Roe by a 5–4 vote in its Casey decision, there was a concerted effort in Congress to codify Roe by passing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).
“In the weeks following Bill Clinton’s election, abortion rights groups said they were confident that a bill to codify a woman’s right to an abortion would become law within the first few months of the 103rd Congress,” Congressional Quarterly reported in May 1993. FOCA had passed out of committee in the Senate, but by May of 1993 divisions had emerged that threatened the bill: Supporters of the bill “feared a flood of floor amendments that they said would undermine the bill’s intent.”
As CQ explained:
[FOCA] would have the effect of overturning existing state laws that require 24-hour waiting periods and would nullify some parental notice and consent laws for minors. Many House members and senators want to allow precisely those types of restrictions on abortion. But abortion rights groups and their allies in Congress are adamantly opposed to such limits.
FOCA’s legislative text made plain that no state could restrict abortion “at any time” in pregnancy so long as the procedure was needed to protect the “health” of the mother. The term “health” was left undefined, and an open amendment process could have narrowed its meaning, so that the bill would protect only those with serious physical — as opposed to psychological — health issues.
“I’m firmly pro-choice for the first three months of pregnancy,” Democratic congressman Paul McHale of Pennsylvania told CQ. “But I have a great deal of difficulty as a matter of conscience accepting elective termination [of pregnancy] at that last stage in the gestational process.”
“The position we’re caught in is allowing no amendments and having people vote against it because of that, and allowing amendments that make the bill unacceptable to pro-choice people,” Republican congresswoman Olympia Snowe of Maine said in the same report.