Senate Democrats on Wednesday forced consideration of measures intended to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom, using the upcoming anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade to remind voters of Republican opposition to measures with broad voter approval.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, brought to the floor four bills that would protect a woman’s right to abortion access and contraception. He did so under a procedure that requires unanimous consent of the Senate, meaning that an objection from a single Republican lawmaker would result in their failure.
That was the point: to force Republicans to block what Democrats described as common-sense bills that protect existing rights, and to highlight how opposition to abortion rights and related issues has become a political liability at the national level for the G.O.P.
“As we fight to get the votes we need to restore Roe, it’s imperative that we make plain to the country just how extreme and dangerous Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda is,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who organized the initiative to bring the bills to the floor.
Some Republicans dismissed the maneuver as nothing more than a blatantly partisan “Dobbs messaging festival,” coming during a busy week of committee work before Congress leaves for a two-week recess. (The case that overturned the right to abortion is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.)
But Mr. Schumer said Democrats were using it to “expose the Republicans’ radical, anti-choice agenda for what it is: an endless pursuit of a nationwide abortion ban.”
“Republicans, deep down, want to ban abortions for everyone, everywhere,” he said.
The proposed legislation the Senate took up Wednesday afternoon included a bill that would enshrine into law the right to use birth control; a bill that would ensure women can travel freely to receive abortion care; a bill to ensure doctors can continue to safely provide legal abortion care and protect health care providers from being held liable for providing services to patients from other states; and a bill to protect people’s online health data so it cannot be used against them.
The outcome seemed preordained: Republicans blocked many of those same bills last year. And on the Senate floor on Wednesday, they railed against all four bills, arguing that putting them forward served only to underscore Democrats’ “obsession” with abortion and address problems that didn’t exist.
Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, objected to codifying the protection of contraception, arguing, “This bill is not about contraception, it’s about abortion.” He said the legislation’s “ulterior motive” was to protect access to abortion, because it included a provision that would guarantee funding for Planned Parenthood.
Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, said there was “an obsession on the left with abortion” and that a bill to ensure women could travel to receive abortion care was “dealing with a phantom problem, a phantom law that does not exist.”
There are currently no abortion bans that attempt to prosecute women who cross state lines to seek an abortion. But Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat of Nevada, said that “constitutional rights don’t enforce themselves” and that many states were looking at laws that would do just that.
“What we do have an obsession with is freedom,” Ms. Cortez Masto said in an impassioned retort on the floor.
Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, said protecting online health data could be a bipartisan issue. But, she said, “one-sided efforts to promote abortion is not the way to find common ground on this issue.” And Senator Ted Budd, Republican of North Carolina, objected to protecting doctors and health care providers from liability simply because “it would make it easier for unborn life to be ended.”
Last year, the Senate failed to pass legislation to guarantee abortion rights nationwide, as Republicans and one Democrat in the Senate blocked an effort to enshrine the Roe v. Wade precedent in federal law.
Since the overturning of Roe, 14 states have passed near-complete bans on abortion. An additional eight states have passed abortion bans that are temporarily blocked in court.
But the backlash has also helped boost Democrats in national elections. A record number of Americans say they support at least some access to abortion, according to recent polls. Reaction to the Dobbs decision helped mitigate an expected “red wave” in last year’s midterm elections.
Still, House Republicans have continued appealing to their conservative base, which has made opposition to abortion rights a litmus test, by trying to make access to abortion even harder. In the second policy bill they brought to the floor after taking back control of the House in January, Republicans pushed through legislation that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said in a speech this week that protecting life was not an extreme position. Speaking in front of an anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Ms. Stefanik tried to frame Democrats and progressives as extremists.
“Pro-life advocates were beaten by radicals in the streets, illegally targeted by President Biden’s F.B.I., and arrested in their homes with their children present for peacefully protesting and standing for life,” she said. Ms. Stefanik was referring to the case of Mark Houck, who was charged by the Justice Department last year for assaulting a volunteer at a Planned Parenthood center in Philadelphia. His wife claimed that a SWAT team had come to arrest him at home in front of their seven children.
Still, it is not clear that that message is resonating with voters. Representative Sharice Davids, Democrat of Kansas, won re-election last year in a district that was at the center of the fallout from the Dobbs decision, a red state where residents voted overwhelmingly to reject an initiative that would have ended abortion rights in the state.
“It was very impactful when it came to my re-election efforts,” Ms. Davids said in an interview this week, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision a year ago. “It’s an interesting tactic for folks with more extreme positions on this stuff to continue to push — even when voters have shown up at the ballot box to say this is not the thing we want you, Congress, to be legislating.”
On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Julie Rikelman, an abortion-rights lawyer, as a federal appeals court judge. Ms. Rikelman represented the Mississippi abortion clinic in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
