March 08
By Kaia Hubbard
The White House rebuked the Republican governors of Florida and Texas on Tuesday for touting what they described as a belief in the smaller-government mantra of “freedom for all” while “attacking the freedom to make one’s own health care decisions” amid abortion developments in the states.
Calling out Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the White House chastised the leaders for their states’ policies that are “out of touch” with the majority of Americans, while again urging Congress to restore federal protections for abortion.
But absent a path forward in a divided Congress or other mechanisms to safeguard the procedure at the federal level, the White House has more recently seemed to turn its attention to states in its efforts to protect access to the procedure since the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in June.
In Florida, as the state legislative session began on Tuesday, lawmakers proposed a measure that would ban abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy, the likes of which DeSantis has pledged to sign.
The proposal in Florida comes a year after the state approved a measure banning the procedure beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy, which abortion rights supporters saw as a massive blow to the state and region, since Florida had previously been considered friendly to the procedure. With the new ban, which is all-but guaranteed to pass in the Republican-controlled legislature, advocates warn that abortion access will be even more imperiled.
“This ban would prevent not just the nearly 4 million Florida women of reproductive age from accessing abortion care after six weeks but would also impact the nearly 15 million women of reproductive age who live in states across the South with abortion bans and would no longer be able to rely on Florida as an option to access care,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Meanwhile in Texas, which has even before the fall of Roe v. Wade been home to some of the most restrictive abortion policies in the nation, a group of five women who say they were denied medically necessary abortions filed a lawsuit on Monday against the state for its abortion policies, which allow physicians to provide an abortion only to save the life of the woman. The women are asking that a judge clarify that doctors cannot be prosecuted for performing medically necessary abortions, which they say the law is unclear about, as some providers have reportedly been unwilling to perform the procedure even in emergency situations for fear of prison time or losing their licenses.
The lawsuit marks what appears to be the first time that pregnant women themselves have challenged state bans since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“The lawsuit includes devastating, first-hand accounts of women’s lives almost lost after they were denied the health care they needed, because of extreme efforts by Republican officials to control women’s bodies,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. “Many extremist ‘so-called’ leaders espouse ‘freedom for all,’ while directly attacking the freedom to make one’s own health care decisions. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, the President and I believe women – in consultation with their doctors – should be in charge of their reproductive health care, not politicians.”
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