A bill banning most abortions after 20 weeks nationwide received consideration from a House panel on Thursday — and the Kermit Gosnell case and recent court rulings provided a fresh backdrop.
But the same familiar arguments in the fight over abortion dominated the discussion.
Rep. Trent Franks’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice heard testimony on his District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which bans abortions after 20 weeks based on the controversial assertion that a fetus can feel pain at that point in a pregnancy. The bill originally applied to just Washington, D.C., but Franks (R-Ariz.) announced last week he would amend it to cover all 50 states as well.
He did so, he says, because of the grisly case of Philadelphia abortion provider Gosnell, who was recently convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of newborns in his clinic — along with hundreds of lesser charges, including performing abortions after 24 weeks in violation of Pennsylvania law.
“If there is one thing that we must not miss about this unspeakably evil episode, it is that Kermit Gosnell is not an anomaly in this gruesome Fortune 500 enterprise of killing of unborn children,” Franks said Thursday. “Rather, Kermit Gosnell was actually the true face of abortion on demand in America.”
But the hearing came just two days after the 9th Circuit Court struck down a law similar to Franks’s bill in Arizona as unconstitutional. The court ruled that the 20-week abortion ban directly conflicts with Supreme Court precedent that says states can’t outlaw abortions prior to viability — which is usually considered to be around 23 or 24 weeks into a pregnancy.
Abortion-rights groups and Democratic lawmakers accused Franks of trying to pass an unconstitutional law that could harm women’s health.
“It is no small irony that Rep. Franks is using the subcommittee on the Constitution to advance legislation attacking the firmly established constitutional rights of women,” Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the legal challenge against the Arizona law, said in a statement. “Everywhere that similarly unconstitutional laws have been challenged in the courts — including Rep. Franks’s home state of Arizona just this week — they have been blocked before they could jeopardize women’s health and lives.”
Maureen Condic of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah testified that a fetus can experience pain at eight weeks.
But this assertion of “fetal pain” has been disputed by others in the field, said subcommittee ranking member Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.).
“Some of the views we’re going to hear today are in fact viewed by many scientists in the field as outliers, not as mainstream scientific thought,” he said.
Nadler also raised concerns that there are some fetal conditions that can’t be diagnosed before 20 weeks in pregnancy, calling that “one of the really harmful consequences of this bill, in my opinion.”
Franks’s bill contains an exception for the life or health of a woman, but not for rape, incest or cases of fetal abnormality.
A spokesman for Franks said it’s “hard to say” if Republican leadership will allow a full vote on the bill in the House, but Franks has “every reason to believe” it will, especially since the bill applying just to D.C. was voted on by the House last year. It received a majority of votes, but failed to get the votes required to pass because it was considered under a procedure that demanded a two-thirds majority. The bill is unlikely to get a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Eleven states have passed similar laws, though some, like Arizona’s, have since been blocked in court. Arkansas and North Dakota have gone further, banning abortion after 12 and six weeks, respectively.
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