The U.S. Senate will vote next week on a bill to codify the right to an abortion into law, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced Thursday.
“Today, I’m announcing that next week the U.S. Senate is going to vote on legislation to codify a woman’s right to seek an abortion into federal law,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Thursday. The vote, he said, would be set for Wednesday.
The move comes in the aftermath of the leaked draft opinion that shows the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion. The draft opinion was first published by POLITICO.
While the bill has virtually no chance of passing the 50-50 Senate, it will force Republican lawmakers to make a difficult vote ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Democrats and abortion rights advocates are hoping to make the issue a central focus of the midterm elections in a year that appeared to be perilous for the party, while Republicans are largely trying to steer clear of wading into abortion politics.
“The American people will see crystal clear that when given the chance to right this wrong, the Republican party will either side with the extremists who want to ban abortion, or side with women with families, and with the vast majority of Americans,” Schumer said.
The New York Democrat called it one of the the “most important” votes the body will take this year because “it deals with one of the most personal and difficult decisions a woman ever has to make in her life.”
“This is not an abstract exercise,” Schumer warned. “My fellow Americans, it’s as real and as urgent as it gets.”
The Women’s Health Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives in September of last year, would need 60 votes in order to advance in the Senate – an unlikely proposition in an evenly divided chamber.
The bill would guarantee the right of a patient to access an abortion, as well as protect the right of a health care provider to administer abortion services.
A procedural vote on the measure failed earlier this year in a 46-48 vote, with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat opposed to abortion rights, joining every Republican Senator present in voting against the measure. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the bill’s lead sponsor in the Senate, has modified the legislation to appease some moderates, but it’s unclear if those changes are enough to sway Manchin’s opinion, or that of Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, two Republican lawmakers who support abortion rights.
Collins, who expressed disappointment with the leaked draft opinion, told Punchbowl News on Thursday that she has concerns about the Democrats’ legislation. Collins and Murkowski have authored a competing abortion rights bill, the Reproductive Choice Act, which is more narrow than the Women’s Health Protection Act, but would codify Roe and the “undue burden” protections from 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Even if either bill gets the support of Sens. Manchin, Collins and Murkowski, it’s unclear if lawmakers could garner enough votes to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote legislative threshold.
