Congress has to reach a spending agreement in just 10 calendar days to avoid another government shutdown. Health care for 27 million people—including 9 million veterans—is in jeopardy because the Republican Congress decided to let funding for community health centers lapse 121 days ago. There is as of yet no agreement on how to keep safe the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers. So what is Mitch McConnell doing with the Senate today? Taking up debate and voting time on an unconstitutional abortion ban, S.2311, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. The bill is intended to amend title 18 of the U.S. code to, according to the bill's summary, make it a “crime for any person to perform or attempt to perform an abortion if the probable post-fertilization age of the fetus is 20 weeks or more.“ Any person who violates this amended code would be subject to criminal penalties, including financial penalties or a prison sentence of up to five years. In some circumstances, the violator could be subject to both.
According to the language in Senator Graham’s bill, the only exception to the 20-week rule would be situations where it would be necessary to save the life of the pregnant person or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. A physician would need to comply with these requirements; in cases of rape, the person would be required to undergo counseling, and in the case of rape or incest against a minor, the incident would have had to be reported to the proper authorities.
This bill isn't just unconstitutional, it's medically and scientifically unsound in its basic premise. A review of more than 2,000 studies found that there is no basis for the idea that fetuses can feel pain before the third trimester, at 26 weeks. Furthermore, the procedure is rare. In 2011, only 13,000 women had the procedure, out of about 1.06 million abortions. Who has them?
Those categories include poor women who didn’t have the money for an earlier abortion, women who underwent a traumatic life event—such as divorce, abuse, or the death of their partner—or women who didn't realize they were pregnant. Teenagers, who may not have regular periods or recognize the signs of pregnancy, and women who are overweight both tend to take longer to realize they are pregnant. Other women terminate their pregnancies due to fatal fetal anomalies. Often, those conditions aren’t recognizable until the fetus is at least 18 to 20 weeks old. "Say it's a serious heart defect," says Daniel Grossman, a member of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. "There isn't a blood test for that. The fetus needs to be a certain size before you can see that. And then it may take a while for a woman to make up her mind about what to do."
So plenty of these procedures are the result of existing abortion restrictions that force women to wait, to spend outrageous sums of money, and to travel hundreds or thousands of miles for care. None of these women make the decision lightly, all of them make it with close consultation with actual medical professionals.
Monday's vote is procedural, a cloture vote requiring 60 votes for the bill to move forward. It's unlikely to get those votes, with very few of the Senate's 49 Democrats likely to cross over, and at least one Republican—Sen. Susan Collins (ME) who has previously voted against it. Another supposedly pro-choice Republican, Lisa Murkowski, wasn't present to vote when it came to the floor in 2015. So why is McConnell forcing it? Partisan politics and nothing else. He wants to put red state Democrats, many of whom are running for re-election this year, on the spot. Nothing more.