WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell is about to plunge the Senate into the nation’s culture wars with votes on bills to sharply restrict access to late-term abortions and threaten some doctors who perform them with criminal penalties, signaling that Republicans plan to make curbing a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy a central theme of their re-election campaigns this year.
After months of shunning legislative activity in favor of confirming President Trump’s judicial nominees — and a brief detour for the president’s impeachment trial — Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, is expected to bring the bills up for votes on Tuesday. Both lack the necessary 60-vote supermajority to advance, and the Senate has voted previously to reject them.
But by putting them on the floor again, Mr. McConnell hopes to energize the social conservatives who helped elect Mr. Trump and whose enthusiasm will be needed to help Republicans hold on to the Senate this year, while forcing vulnerable Democrats to take uncomfortable votes on bills that frame abortion as infanticide. The rhetoric around the measures is hot; Mr. Trump, for instance, has pointed to one of the bills to falsely assert that Democrats favor “executing babies AFTER birth.”
Mr. McConnell declined to be interviewed, though in past speeches he has said the legislation poses “moral questions” that Democrats must answer. And on Monday, noting that only seven countries allow the procedure after 20 weeks of pregnancy, he said the late-term abortion ban would “bring our nation’s regard for the unborn off this sad and radical fringe and bring it more in line with the global mainstream.”
A senior aide said Republican senators were eager for the chance to remind voters of their anti-abortion credentials. Republican strategists say doing so is smart politics.
“It shows just how important this issue has become for a lot of people because of the presidential campaign,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist who is close to Mr. McConnell. “I think we go through lulls in this country where we are not talking about it anymore, but it’s at the top of mind for a lot of conservatives now.”
Still, bringing up the bills exposes Mr. McConnell, who is also running for re-election this year, to accusations that he is playing politics with the Senate’s time. The leader has long insisted he is not interested in “show votes” on measures that stand no chance of passing, and he has drawn derision from Democrats for presiding over what they call a “legislative graveyard,” refusing to take up hundreds of bills they have passed in the House.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused Mr. McConnell of wasting the Senate’s time on “legislation that is purely an attack on women’s health care.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate health committee, said votes were a discouraging reminder of Republicans’ priorities.
“The first thing we do is go after women?” Ms. Murray asked in an interview. “I find it really offensive. If Senator McConnell really wants to get things done in the Senate and show people he wants to get things done, we have a long list for him.”
Both bills put a spotlight on late-term abortions, which are exceedingly rare — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last year that abortions after 20 weeks accounted for 1.2 percent of abortions in 2016, the latest period studied. And the bills carry names that abortion rights advocates regard as inflammatory and misleading.
They come amid a national furor over a push by Democrats in states like New York and Virginia to allow third-trimester abortions to protect the health of the mother, moves that prompted Mr. Trump to tweet last year that Democrats were “the Party of late-term abortion.”
The first bill, the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” bans nearly all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with limited exceptions; for instance, rape victims would be required to undergo counseling first. Proponents, citing their own review of scientific literature, say fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks, but medical experts who favor abortion rights say there is no evidence of that.
The second, the “Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act,” requires doctors to use all means available to save the life of a child born after an abortion, an event that is exceedingly rare and typically occurs when a baby is not viable outside the womb and doctors induce labor as a means of terminating a pregnancy. The bill would subject physicians to fines and prison time if they failed to comply.
Mr. McConnell has called the measure “a straightforward piece of legislation to protect newborn babies.” But opponents say it is at best unnecessary — doctors already provide medical care to newborns — and at worst a government intrusion that would criminalize doctors helping women make wrenching decisions that should be made on a case-by-case basis.
“These are all deeply connected efforts to put abortion out of reach and they are trying to use other language,” said Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to the “born alive” bill.
The action on Capitol Hill comes amid a new wave of enthusiasm among opponents of abortion in Washington and around the country, in large part because of the election of Mr. Trump. When he ran in 2016, Mr. Trump promised to sign the 20-week abortion bill into law and to appoint Supreme Court justices who would oppose Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion.
States have since passed a wave of bills restricting access to abortions. A federal judge last week blocked a Mississippi bill banning abortion after six weeks. And last month, more than 200 Republican members of Congress — including 39 senators — asked the Supreme Court Court to consider overturning Roe, in a brief urging the justices to uphold a Louisiana law that severely restricts access to the abortion.
Mr. Trump has taken to calling himself “the most pro-life president in American history,” and Mr. McConnell has endeared himself to abortion opponents. Last year, the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect candidates that oppose abortion, honored Mr. McConnell at its annual gala with its “distinguished leader” award.
“These votes put pro-abortion Democrats on the defense and serve as a witness to educate the American people about where their elected officials stand,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the group. “We have to have these votes over and over again in order to lead to a change in policy. It’s not a show — its part of the strategy to get the policy.”
Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans, about six in 10, want abortion to remain legal in all or most cases, and there is broad opposition to completely overturning Roe, according to studies conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
But the partisan divide over abortion is deepening, and surveys have shown that support for late-term abortion is not as robust. In a 2018 Gallup poll, 75 percent of respondents supported abortion in the third trimester if the mother’s life was in danger, but just 20 percent supported one at that stage if the woman simply did not want the child.
The abortion votes could be the beginning of a small burst of legislative debate in a Senate that has so far avoided action on some of the biggest issues facing the United States: the high cost of health care, immigration and repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The Senate may also take up health care bills — in particular a measure that would curb surprise medical billing — before the summer, when lawmakers go home to campaign. And lawmakers hope to debate legislation to revise the government’s foreign intelligence surveillance powers.
For Mr. McConnell, the abortion votes are a way to drive a wedge between Democrats without inflicting political harm on Republicans who are facing tough re-election races.
The politics around abortion are complicated for centrists in both parties. Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, both Democrats, voted in favor of the 20-week ban in 2018 when it came up for a vote in the Senate. Two Republicans — Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted against it. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, a Democrat who is facing a tough re-election race this year, joined Mr. Casey, Mr. Manchin and all Senate Republicans last year in voting to advance the born-alive bill.
The issue motivates activists at both ends of the ideological spectrum. After the Senate rejected a version of the born-alive bill last year, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat running for re-election in New Hampshire, faced a barrage of conservative attack ads over her opposition to the measure.
Liberals, who have sometimes been perceived as complacent about abortion rights, are beginning to fear that the restrictive laws they see being enacted in more conservative states like Louisiana and Mississippi could come to more liberal states as well, said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster.
“There was a time where we would explore the bans in places like Michigan and California and people would say, ‘That’s not going to happen here,’” Ms. Lake said. “Now people think that under this administration, under this president, it could come to their state.”
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