Everything You Need To Know About The 20-Week Abortion Ban Advancing In The House

By Tara Culp-Ressler/Think Progress

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a measure spearheaded by Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that would cut off legal access to abortion services at 20 weeks after fertilization. It represents the most restrictive abortion bill to come to a vote in either chamber over the past decade. Here’s what you need to know about this attack on women’s reproductive rights — and how it fits into a broader, coordinated nationwide campaign to slowly chip away at abortion access:

It’s based on the scientifically-disputed theory that fetuses can feel pain before the third trimester of pregnancy.

So-called “fetal pain” measures are based on junk science that represents a minority position among medical professionals. Most doctors don’t believe that fetuses can feel pain until much later in pregnancy, after the point of viability (generally considered to be around 24 weeks), and scientific research has repeatedly confirmed this position. Nevertheless, abortion opponents have successfully stoked emotional outrage surrounding later-term abortion — particularly following the high-profile murder trial of illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell — by twisting the facts to make it appear that these abortions are always barbaric procedures.

It has sparked more controversy over Republicans’ attitudes toward rape.

The original version of Franks’ legislation did not include an exception for victims of rape or incest. Defending the lack of an exception in these cases, the Arizona congressman last week claimed that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Franks is just the latest Republican to make an offensive comment about rape victims, and his comments inspired comparisons to former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous assertion that women don’t often get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because the body “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Following the controversy that erupted from his statements, Franks revised the legislation at the last minuteto include an exemption for survivors of rape and incest — but only if rape victims first report the sexual crime to the police, and if incest victims are minors.

Abortions after 20 weeks are already extremely rare, and the women who need them are usually in the most desperate of circumstances.

Although Franks claimed he didn’t need to legislate rape victims’ reproductive rights because the instances of pregnancies resulting from rape are “very low,” the instances of abortions after 20 weeks are actually much lower than that. Pregnancy results from rape an estimated 5 percent of the time, while abortions after 20 weeks represent just one percent of all abortions. The women who seek out this type of later abortion procedure tend to fall into one of two categories: the economically disadvantaged women who need to delay abortion until they can save up the money for it, and the women who discoverserious fetal health issues only after their pregnancy has advanced. Criminalizing abortion after 20 weeks will force some women to give birth to fetuses with no brain function — or other types of fatal anomalies — and watch their children suffer outside of the womb during their short lives.

The national legislation initially started out as an abortion restriction for the women who live in Washington, DC.

Franks has repeatedly attempted to impose his anti-abortion agenda on the women living in the nation’s capitol. Because the District of Columbia does not have its own representation in Congress, lawmakers from other areas oftenuse it as their legislative playground. Franks’ fetal pain measure failed last year, but that didn’t stop him from re-introducing it — and eventually expanding it to apply to women in every state. The Republican lawmaker said that Gosnell’s crimes compelled him to restrict abortion access not just for DC women, but for women across the entire country.

Even though a national ban has no chance of passing, 20-week bans are successfully advancing on the state level.

Franks’ 20-week ban is essentially dead-on-arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the President has already indicated that he will veto it if it comes to his desk. But that doesn’t mean fetal pain measures are nothing to worry about. In fact, this anti-choice strategy is successfully advancing on the state level. After Nebraska first enacted a 20-week ban on abortion in 2010, a handful of other states rushed to do the same. Now, according to the Guttmacher Institute, about 11 states have banned abortion services before the point of viability specifically based on the notion that fetuses can feel pain — and more states are currently advancing fetal pain bills. Texas is considering a 20-week abortion ban in its special session, and anti-choice lawmakers arehoping to rush it through. GOP-led legislatures in South Carolina and Wisconsinalso may advance fetal pain laws in the last days of their sessions.

“Fetal pain” laws are unconstitutional, and state-level versions have been repeatedly blocked in court.

As increasing numbers of states have enacted 20-week abortion bans, courts have blocked several of them from taking effect. Fetal pain measures effectively narrow the window during which women may exercise their constitutional rights by moving up the cut-off for legal abortion services — a direct violation of Roe v. Wade guarantees the right to legal abortion until the point of viability. Twenty-week bans in Idaho, Georgia, and Franks’ home state of Arizona have all been blocked for this reason.

The anti-choice movement is growing bolder, and abortion opponents are demonstrating they’re not afraid to directly challenge Roe v. Wade.

Even though the national 20-week ban has no chance of becoming law, the fact that Republicans in the House brought it to a vote illustrates the fact that abortion opponents aren’t backing down from the fight. Over the past decade, anti-abortion Republicans have relied on an “incremental” strategy to limit abortion access, passing dozens of state-level restrictions couched in terms of “women’s health and safety” rather than attempting to ban the procedure altogether. Lawmakers used to be wary to advance stringent laws that overstepRoe and are likely be struck down in court. That’s not the case anymore. This session, state legislatures have passed increasingly harsh abortion bans — like a six-week ban in North Dakota and a 12-week ban in Arkansas — and they’ve made it clear that they want to test the boundaries of Roe v. Wade. “These laws are flying through,” Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, told the New York Times. “The attention has really been at the state level around abortion issues. Now what you also see at the federal level is very disturbing, and it shows that abortion opponents are very emboldened.”

UPDATE

A previous version of this post stated that the House voted to approve the 20-week ban on Tuesday afternoon. In fact, the House voted to approve a vote on the legislation. The vote is expected to be later on Tuesday evening.

UPDATE

On Tuesday evening at about 6:45 pm, the House passed the 20-week abortion ban by a vote of 228 to 196.

All-male House subcommittee votes to restrict abortion nationwide

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story
An all-male House Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday approved legislation that would impose a new nationwide restriction on abortion.

By a party line vote of 6-4, the House Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice approved a bill that would ban abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is based on the belief that fetuses are capable of experiencing pain after 20 weeks gestation.

When Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) first proposed the legislation, it only would have covered the District of Columbia. But Franks successfully pushed for the bill to apply nationwide following the conviction of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell.

“The trial of Kermit Gosnell exposed late abortions for what they really are: relocated infanticide,” Frank said Tuesday in a statement. “I pray we use this as a ‘teachable moment,’ in the words of President Obama, and can agree that, at the very least, we are better than dismembering babies who can feel every excruciating moment.”

Opponents of the legislation argue that it is unconstitutional because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar law in Arizona’s last month.

“It is astonishing that the Subcommittee on the Constitution would support such a clear affront to the U.S. Constitution — especially when everywhere similar laws have been challenged in the courts, they have been immediately blocked,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

House Republicans Push Bill To Ban Abortions Based On The Race Or Sex Of The Fetus

By Tanya Somanader/Think Progress

For House Republicans, this year has been the year of outlandish answers to non-existent problems. And tomorrow, they will offer the magnum opus of their 2011 campaign against a woman’s right to choose: the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA). The bill seeks to somehow protect the “civil rights” of fetuses by banning physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex. While the woman would be exempt from prosecution, physicians who perform the procedure can be sued for damages.

Tomorrow, the measure will enter the spotlight in the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, as will the man behind the effort: GOP Rep. Trent Franks (AZ). His chief motivation, he told the Daily Caller, is to solely to end discrimination, or as his chief proponents argue, the genocide of minority fetuses:

According to Franks, a ban on these types of abortions is needed because minority babies are aborted at five times the rate of white babies and, based on a 2008 report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Census data shows that certain populations have ‘son-biased” ratios due to “sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stages.”[...]

“People will say I have a greater agenda — and they are right — I hope for a day when all children, regardless of race or color, all children because they are children will be protected,” he said.

“But right now regardless of what the long term impact of this might be the short term impact is very simple: Can we not agree that aborting a child based on a child’s race or sex is wrong?”

The act of such selective abortion would be a problem worth addressing if it was actually a problem. In his own state of Arizona (which recently passed a statewide version of this bill),not one state official or independent search offered any support for the claim that women abort babies based on race. What’s more, not only have the number of baby girls born increased since abortion became legal but only 5 percent of abortions take place beyond the point when a fetus’s sex can be determined. In reality, rather than addressing any verifiable prejudice, the bill actually exacerbates the discrimination Franks claims to be targeting.

The real reasons behind high abortion rates among African Americans and minorities arecomplex. Higher rates of unintended pregnancies, inadequate health insurance, substandard health care, ineffective use of birth control, and poor sex education often leave abortion as the only choice for women. The chief reason behind abortions is unintended pregnancy, not unwanted race or sex.

Motor City Liberal Comment: The year is almost out and the Republicans have not passed one job bill.

Nine Months After Giffords Shooting, GOP Congressman Jokes ‘You Have To Have Shot Someone’ To Win Office In Arizona

By Marie Diamond/Think Progress


After the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in January that claimed six lives and wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D), politicians from both parties pledged to clean up their violent rhetoric. But apparently this lesson was lost on Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) who made light of gun violence during a congressional hearing on Friday.

REP. STEVE COHEN (D-TN): If you have a law in Arizona and they don’t have that prohibition in Ohio the person in Ohio who comes to Arizona can have a gun when they couldn’t have one in Arizona. I know in Arizona you have to have a gun.

FRANKS: In Arizona sometimes to gain office you have to have shot someone. I’m joking, of course. I hope that the media understands that.

Watch it, courtesy of Political Correction:

Despite his immediate qualification that he was merely joking, Franks’ record speaks volumesabout how much he values gun safety. In the wake of the Tucson shooting, he infamously said, “I wish there had been one more gun” that day. Franks latest insensitive comments about gun violence in Arizona make it seem like Jared Loughner, the man accused of the Tuscon shooting, is the logical successor to Giffords.

Franks made his comments while the House Judiciary Committee was considering Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) radical bill that would allow, among other things, people from states with concealed carry laws to bring guns to DC, despite it being forbidden by local gun regulations. Franks voted down Democratic amendments that would have prevented sex offenders, people on the Terrorist Watch List, those with misdemeanor convictions for stalking, and domestic abusers who have restraining orders against them from carrying guns legally outside their home states.

Rep. Trent Franks: African-Americans were better off under slavery.

By Alex Seitz-Wald

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) — one of the most conservative member of Congress, according to a new National Journal ranking — decried the strained state of political discourse in an interview today with blogger-activist Mike Stark. While defending hate radio host Rush Limbaugh, Franks said bipartisanship and “true tolerance” is about “being halfway decent to each other in spite of the differences.” But when the conversation turned to abortion, Franks made a clearly indecent comment, claiming that African-Americans were probably better off under slavery than they are today:

FRANK: In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say “How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.” And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

Watch it (beginning 6:20):

Franks continued by saying, “[S]ometimes we get angry and say things that we shouldn’t say, and I apologize…[for saying things] that are intemperate. But I don’t want to hide from the truth.” Franks’ comments are reminiscent of a new anti-choice campaign which seeks to put up 80 billboards in “urban areas where blacks reside” with the message, “Black children are an endangered species.”

M.C.L comment: And Republicans wonder why blacks and other minorities flip them the bird during every election cycle.