WASHINGTON — The House is set to vote Friday on legislation that would codify abortion rights protections as Roe v. Wade comes under threat from a Texas law banning most abortions and a wave of restrictions in other states.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had said the vote on the bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would be a priority for Democrats once they returned to Washington from recess.
Sept. 20, 202107:36
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 order allowing the Texas law to take effect earlier this month was a “cowardly, dark-of-night decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women’s rights and health” and “necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade,” she said.
While the measure is expected pass in the House, it faces a dead end in the evenly split Senate, where Democrats would need at least 10 Republicans to support the bill for it to advance to a final vote. So far, it has 47 co-sponsors.
Democrats are concerned that other states could follow in the footsteps of Texas, whose law, Senate Bill 8, bans abortions in the state as early as six weeks of pregnancy, before most women know they are even pregnant. The law allows anyone, even someone outside of Texas, to sue an abortion provider or anyone else who helped someone get an abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected for at least $10,000 per defendant.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in a Mississippi abortion case in early December. The high court is expected to consider the legality of Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that is intended to challenge the landmark 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision protecting a woman’s right to an abortion.
In the Senate, Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he plans to hold a hearing about Texas’ strict new abortion law and the Supreme Court’s decisions on that and other issues that it made on an emergency basis.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
