WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Tuesday went on the offensive on reproductive rights, announcing that they will seek to force a vote on legislation to codify the right to birth control access nationwide.
The maneuver, through a procedural move known as a discharge petition, is all but certain to fail for lack of Republican support, but that is by design. It is part of a broad election-year push by Democrats to highlight Republicans’ record of opposing abortion rights and other reproductive health choices that voters fear will be stripped away after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“The choice to use birth control should be yours and yours alone,” Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, who has held abortion events with 11 members and candidates across the country, said at a news conference outside the Capitol. House Republicans, she said, “can put aside their MAGA ideology, join us, join the American people and get this bill passed. Or they can triple down on their anti-freedom extremism in full view of the American people.”
The move comes as Senate Democrats plan to force a vote this week on an identical contraceptive access bill, which Republicans are expected to block. The coordinated legislative push shows that Democrats regard access to abortion, contraception and reproductive health options as their strongest issues on which to draw a contrast with Republicans before the November elections.
“Voters know that Republicans oppose abortion and that they are generally supportive of restrictions on abortion,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. “What voters don’t know is that Republicans are actively trying to find ways to ban and restrict abortion and contraception. That’s a significant gap of opportunity for Democrats. There’s a difference between being against something and actively working to take it away.”
FERTILITY FIGHT
On Monday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who has used fertility treatment to have her two children, introduced a bill called the Right to IVF ACT, which would also make it more accessible through insurance as well as for military members and veterans. Although a pair of Senate Republicans have advanced their own proposal that would discourage states from banning IVF treatment, neither bill is expected to gain the significant bipartisan support that would be necessary to pass Congress.
Instead, Democrats are trying this month to show how Republicans are mostly unwilling to support legislation creating federal protections for reproductive care. It’s a similar strategy that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, used in the run-up to the 2022 election after the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion.
“This will be one of the most important issues in the presidential campaign, and make no mistake about it, Joe Biden is fully for women’s reproductive rights. Donald Trump has opposed them time and time again,” Schumer said at an event in his home state last week.
GOP lawmakers have been careful not to interfere with abortion opponents’ ability to advance state laws that grant an embryo or fetus the same rights as a person. Sens. Katie Britt of Alabama and Ted Cruz of Texas have advanced a proposal that would threaten to withhold federal Medicaid funding from any state that would enact an outright ban on IVF treatment.
When she introduced the bill last month, Britt said in a statement, “IVF is pro-family, and I’m proud to strongly support continued nationwide access to this pathway to parenthood for the millions of American couples facing infertility.”
Still, some hard-right Republicans have opposed expanding access to IVF. After the Department of Veterans Affairs announced in March that it would provide fertility services to veterans who are unmarried or in same-sex marriages, four Republicans in the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus released a letter opposing the move and saying the treatment was “morally dubious and should not be subsidized by the American taxpayer.”
“Struggling with infertility is painful enough — every American deserves the right to access the treatment and tools they need to build the family of their dreams without the fear of being prosecuted for murder or manslaughter,” Duckworth said in a statement.
The political dynamics around reproductive care left practically no chance of finding bipartisan agreement on legislation. Republicans raised concerns about the bill’s implications for other reproductive technology and Cruz, who is running for reelection in Texas, quickly criticized the Democratic proposal as “deliberately overbroad.”
“This is an issue of consensus,” he said. “The Democrats don’t want consensus. They want to play politics.”
HOUSE VOTE
In the House, the complicated and drawn-out discharge petition process allows lawmakers to make an end run around their leaders and force consideration of a piece of legislation on the floor if they collect the signatures of a majority of the members of the House. With Republicans holding a slim majority — 217 seats to Democrats’ 213 — only a handful of defectors would need to sign to meet the threshold of 218 votes.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C., already has 203 co-sponsors, all Democrats, putting it well within striking distance. Under House rules, Democrats must wait seven workdays before they can start collecting signatures for the petition. After that, Democrats say they plan to spotlight Republicans’ failure to sign on early and often — focusing especially on those from competitive districts.
“All those freshman Republicans in New York and California that cost us the House majority in 2022 will have to answer a question of why are they not signing it,” said Chris Fleming, a Democratic strategist.
The discharge petition mechanism was created as a last-ditch check on the power of the majority party. While it seldom succeeds, earlier this year Democrats and Republicans did use one to force a vote on legislation that would provide tax relief to victims of disasters around the country, and it passed overwhelmingly.
The House first passed the Right to Contraception Act in July 2022, when Democrats controlled the House, immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that overturned abortion rights at the federal level. Democrats pushed through the bill over almost unanimous Republican opposition in part because Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion in Dobbs, wrote that the court “should reconsider” other precedents beyond Roe, including those protecting same-sex marriage and the right to contraception. Senate Republicans blocked the legislation, which was opposed by anti-abortion groups that said the bill’s definition of contraceptives could be interpreted to include pills that induce abortion.
“Extremist Republican politicians are waging war on women’s reproductive health,” Manning said. “They’ve stripped women of their constitutional right to obtain an abortion, attacked fertility treatments and are now attempting to restrict access to birth control.”
Outside groups are boosting the legislative push by pouring tens of millions of dollars into competitive House districts to amplify the message. The main super political action committee supporting House Democrats last month announced a new $100 million fund focusing on abortion rights in swing districts.
And the group Americans for Contraception plans to spend more than $7 million on television and digital ads, some targeting Republicans in the Senate who vote against the bill and House members who do not sign the petition, and others thanking vulnerable Senate Democrats who vote to pass the bill this week. They also plan to have a 20-foot-tall intrauterine device roaming around Washington to raise awareness on the issue of contraception.
Republicans remain in a bind on issues of reproductive rights, as they struggle to reconcile their party’s hard-line policies on women’s health measures and the reality that they are out of step with the vast majority of the country. Despite that, they continue to tuck anti-abortion policies into pending legislation, a sign of the power of the anti-abortion lobby in national politics.
Information for this article was contributed by Annie Karni of The New York Times and by Stephen Groves of The Associated Press.
