Democrats and pro-choice advocates have been howling for weeks about what’s in the Republican abortion bills currently working their way through the House.
Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA), ardently pro-choice, says it’s time to focus on what’s not not in the bills. Chu, a member of the House Judiciary Committee which will be taking up one of the abortion bills on Thursday, has offered two amendments she says clear up dangerously unaddressed abortion access questions in H.R. 3, the bill first criticized for it’s now-dropped language regarding “forcible rape.”
Chu wants to make sure the law protects women’s access to emergency abortion care while ensuring that women will be informed of all their medical options, even if a provider is opposed to abortion. Neither subject is addressed directly in H.R. 3 as it currently stands — and that’s what worries Chu.
“For goodness sake,” Chu told TPM in an interview from her Capitol Hill office Wednesday. “It doesn’t say anything about whether the woman’s life has to be preserved.”
Proponents of H.R. 3 have said the bill is intended to make permanent existing federal restrictions on abortion funding, restrictions that limit federal coverage to abortions in the cases of rape, incest or where the health of the mother is at risk. But critics like Chu have said the law goes much farther than that, and seeks to undo much of the abortion access protections pro-choice advocates have been trying to protect for decades.
Running alongside H.R. 3 is H.R. 358, which in its original version critics said would allow anti-abortion medical providers to deny women emergency abortion care — a violation of current law. Democrats have tried to close that loophole, but to no avail.
Chu’s amendments to H.R. 3 would make clear that emergency funding and notification requirements remain protected. She says the amendments represent twin goals: first, to try and get the protections codified in the new law (which is not likely to happen with Republicans in charge of the House) and second to get Republicans on the record opposing rules protecting the life of a woman in need of emergency abortion services.
“I present this to bring up the issue and to make it very black and white that we should be upholding [emergency abortion care rights]. I want to see them vote it down,” Chu told TPM. “I’m not saying that I want to actually see it [fail]. I would love for them to accept their amendment. But I suspect that considering the partisanship on the committee that it may not happen.”
Democrats have seized on the abortion fight, claiming the Republican push on abortion is alienating them from the fiscally-focused base that put them in charge of the House last November. Chu says the Republican efforts will more than likely be stopped by the Democratically-controlled Senate or the pro-choice President Obama.
But she said the House battle sends an important message, and exposes the abortion fight for what it is.
“I think that the Republicans are focusing on their extremist agenda rather than on the nuts and bolts of what the American people want,” she said. “People want jobs, they want the economy to be repaired. Instead, the Republicans are pursuing with great aggression these kinds of rollbacks on women’s health.”
[Ed note: This post has been corrected to describe Rep. Judy Chu as “ardently pro-choice”. An earlier version incorrectly referred to the Congresswoman as an “ardent pro-lifer”.]
