By: John McCormack – Nationalreview.com – February 18, 2022

With eight months to go until the 2022 midterm elections, Chuck Schumer is planning to hold the first vote in Senate history on a bill that would create a virtually unlimited nationwide right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy:

Versions of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which in an earlier iteration was known as the Freedom of Choice Act, have been introduced in every Congress for more than three decades. But the bill didn’t make it to the floor of the House or the Senate for a full vote until September 2021, when House Democrats voted almost unanimously to pass it.

The WHPA doesn’t have close to the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster. In fact, there may not even be 50 senators who support it. Pro-life Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia opposes the bill, as does pro-choice Maine Republican Susan Collins, who says it is too “extreme.”

Groups such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL demanded a vote on the legislation last fall, and Nancy Pelosi complied. The ostensible trigger for Pelosi’s decision to hold the vote was the passage of the Texas Heartbeat Act, but the WHPA is not narrowly targeted at the unpopular provisions of that state law; it’s a sweeping bill that would wipe nearly all state abortion laws off the books, from parental-consent laws to 24-hour waiting limits to meaningful limits on late-term abortions.

When Pelosi brought the bill up for a vote, she put her own vulnerable members — as well as House Democrats seeking Senate seats such as Val Demings in Florida, Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, and Tim Ryan in Ohio — in a similarly uncomfortable position. After the bill passed the House in September, National Review asked Representative Lamb, who’d ultimately voted for it, if there were any limits he could support on abortion late in pregnancy. “I think the right to choose is a right all the way through pregnancy,” he said.

Creating a right to abortion “all the way through pregnancy” in all 50 states is exactly what the WHPA does. The bill creates an absolute right to abortion prior to fetal viability — that is, prior to the point at which a baby can likely survive outside the womb — and prevents state laws from protecting a baby’s life after viability whenever a single “health-care provider” determines that the continuation of the pregnancy “would pose a risk” to the mother’s life or “health.”

The bill’s chief Senate sponsor, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, has acknowledged that it “doesn’t distinguish” between physical and psychological health, and the text of the bill is explicit that, “In interpreting the provisions of this Act, a court shall liberally construe such provisions to effectuate the purposes of the Act.”

The ruling in Roe v. Wade’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, established a broad definition of “health”: “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age. . . . All these factors may relate to health.” And the majority opinion in Roe declared: “That opinion [Doe] and this one, of course, are to be read together.”

Democrats often describe the Women’s Health Protection Act as a bill meant to “codify Roe,” but the WHPA actually manages to be even more radical than that already-extreme Supreme Court ruling in at least a couple of key respects.

As Senator Collins told the Los Angeles Times while announcing her opposition in September, the WHPA would “severely weaken the [conscience] exceptions that are in the current law,” eliminating protections and defenses afforded to health-care providers and by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as no federal law has ever done before.

The bill also enshrines a right for non-doctors to perform abortions, even after viability. The determination of whether a post-viability pregnancy poses a risk to a “pregnant patient’s life or health” may be made by a lone “health care provider” — a term that includes but is not limited to a “certified nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, and physician assistant.”

While Collins opposes the bill, the other Republican who supports a right to abortion, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, has not yet taken a position. While pro-life Democrat Manchin opposes it, Democrat Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, who also describes himself as pro-life, issued a statement on Thursday night saying that he would support bringing the bill to the floor for debate:

The question before the U.S. Senate on this vote is whether the Senate will proceed to debate the Women’s Health Protection Act. Given the recent Supreme Court rulings, potential rulings this year, and the Republican Party’s clear and unrelenting use of this issue as a political weapon, I will vote ‘yes’ to allow debate on this bill. I have long worked to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions, and I hope that as part of this debate we will also focus on new and substantial funding for pregnant women, infants, and children.

Casey’s statement does not make clear whether he supports the underlying bill or simply wants to “proceed to debate” on it. A Casey spokesman did not reply on Friday to an email from National Review asking for the senator’s position on the bill itself. But Casey’s decision to oppose a filibuster of the bill is on its own remarkable. As the son of a famously pro-life Democratic governor, Casey won his seat in 2006 by running as a “pro-life Democrat” — a term he still embraced as of his 2018 reelection campaign. Casey has repeatedly voted for a 20-week limit on abortion that would be voided by the WHPA. And Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit on abortion — which only includes exceptions for serious physical health issues — would also have to be stricken from the books if the WHPA passed. Under that Pennsylvania law, the Abortion Control Act, notorious abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted in 2013 for killing 21 infants in utero (in addition to his conviction for murdering three infants with scissors after they had been born).

The WHPA won’t get anywhere close to the 60 votes it needs to overcome a filibuster in this Congress. But Democrats are already making it clear that if they hold the House and pick up the two Senate seats they need to nuke the chamber’s filibuster rules in November, they’ll be in a position to pass their radical abortion bill in the next Congress — and they’ll aim to do so.

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Source: Chuck Schumer to Force Senate Vote on Radical Abortion Bill | National Review