Score one for women — especially moderate Republican women.
On Wednesday evening, House Republican leaders were forced to scrap a vote on a controversial anti-abortion measure scheduled to coincide with anti-abortion advocates’ annual March for Life in Washington and the 42nd anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade — a ruling which negated state laws that prevented a woman from having an abortion based on the constitutional right to privacy.
Instead, the House passed watered-down legislation that bans federal funding for abortions. Never mind that the 30-year-old federal Hyde Amendment already bans federal funding for abortion in all but the most extreme circumstances. Apparently House Republicans are counting on conservative voter ignorance to save their collective face.
Why the retrenching now on the first bill, the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which would ban abortions for women who are beyond 20 weeks into their pregnancy except in connection with rape?
Because women in the House rebelled at the harsh string attached to the ban’s rape exception — that the rape had to be reported to police in order to obtain the so-called late-term abortion.