Attempts to restrict abortion at the federal level have been stymied by progressives in the U.S. House and Senate, as well as the promise of a veto from President Biden, but that hasn’t stopped conservatives in Congress from introducing bills attacking reproductive rights.
The tumultuous battles for Speaker of the House were also a boon to anti-abortion extremists in the House, after Representative Mike Johnson succeeded Representative Kevin McCarthy to the role. Johnson has sponsored or cosponsored at least 17 anti-abortion bills in the current legislative session.
Conservative legislators’ most direct attempt to curtail reproductive rights in the United States came after Johnson became speaker, through the federal funding bill H.R.5894, which provided funding for the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
H.R.5894 was effectively a Project 2025 wish list. It would have:
- Defunded Planned Parenthood and banned abortion service referrals by Title X clinics.
- Allowed anyone to sue for “actual or threatened” violations of the Weldon Amendment, which says organizations – including government agencies or state and local governments – are banned from receiving HHS funding if they “discriminate” against health care providers that do not “provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.” The change explicitly says that, unlike before, anyone can sue, even if they are not a health care provider, which would let anti-abortion activists bury clinics in a mountain of legal fees.
- Blocked executive orders protecting access to abortion.
- Changed medical training programs so that fewer doctors were trained in life-saving abortion care.
- Restricted NIH medical research using stem cells.
- Cut funding for Title X.
- Ended funding for comprehensive sex education and instead funded ineffective abstinence-only programs.
- Blocked the Biden Administration’s efforts to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.
Ultimately, H.R. 5894 proved too extreme even for House Republicans, and Johnson was forced to cancel the floor vote before it started.
Speaker Johnson also introduced a federal bill styled after Idaho’s “abortion trafficking law” at the start of the legislative session. That bill would make it a crime to transport minors across state lines to receive an abortion without their parent’s consent.
Unlike the Idaho law, Johnson’s bill allows an exception for cases of incest – at least it is supposed to. However, the child would be required to provide a written, signed declaration of incest to the doctor. The doctor would then be required to report the abuse to relevant authorities in the child’s home state before performing the abortion.
A vast majority of children never tell authorities about their abuse, for a variety of reasons. This requirement would mean that most children would be unable to have an abortion, even in cases of incest. There is also no exception for rape, meaning a child could be forced to carry a pregnancy to term if their parent would not consent to their abortion.
Perhaps most concerning is Speaker Johnson’s decision to cosponsor H.R.431, the Life at Conception Act. The Life at Conception Act creates a “right to life” from “the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.” Speaker Johnson has claimed that the United States was founded on the Christian principle that humans are created in the image of God and have a right to life from conception several times over the years.
This catastrophic bill does not include exceptions for rape, incest, or for the life or physical health of the parent. The language would include IVF and other fertility treatments, effectively banning them in the United States, as we saw in Alabama. It has 131 sponsors, meaning just over half of Republican representatives have cosponsored the bill. There are no Democratic cosponsors.
The 15 other bills that Speaker Johnson cosponsored include:
- Four that would defund Planned Parenthood or other abortion clinics that receive Title X funding:
- Two that would ban the NIH from funding medical research using fetal tissue from abortions:
- A bill that would require doctors to try and keep a baby alive after a failed abortion, with no exceptions for children born with terminal abnormalities like anencephaly, where a fetus develops without portions of its brain or skull:
- The bill passed the House, but never received a vote in the Senate.
- American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) condemned the bill, arguing that it would prevent doctors and families from making “significant quality of life decisions.”
- Planned Parenthood called the bill “deceptive” and accused it of inventing “a problem that doesn’t exist” in a press release. Planned Parenthood pointed out that “doctors already have an obligation to provide appropriate medical care” when a child is born alive.
- A bill that would require doctors to lie to patients that receive the abortion pill. H.R.983, the “Second Chance at Life Act of 2023” would require doctors to tell patients that it may be possible to reverse the abortion pill by taking progesterone. ACOG denies these claims, pointing out that studies that supposedly show it is possible to “reverse” the abortion pill are deeply flawed and potentially unethical.
- One study that attempted to prove whether progesterone could reverse the effects of the abortion pill had to stop after a third patient was hospitalized for severe bleeding.