“When we go back to Washington, we will be putting Roe v. Wade codification on the floor of the House to make sure that women everywhere have access to the reproductive health that they need,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged last September. When a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision leaked in May, President Joe Biden stressed the need for “legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
A bill introduced earlier this month aims to do exactly that, writing into law the holdings of Supreme Court decisions that guaranteed the right to contraception and to abortion before fetal viability, usually in the 22nd to 24th week of pregnancy.
But translating abortion-related court decisions into legislative language that everyone can agree on has turned out to be more difficult and controversial than lawmakers have publicly acknowledged.The bill, known as the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, is a bipartisan effort, sponsored by Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Kyrsten Sinema. It has sparked outrage among the leaders of abortion rights groups: They argue it would not actually codify key Supreme Court decisions and could even be a step backward from what Americans had before Dobbs. The measure does much less to protect abortion rights than the Women’s Health Protection Act, abortion rights groups’ favored bill, which passed the House but has failed twice in the Senate.
Their reaction underscores a key debate over Democrats’ legislative strategy in post-Roe America. Even as Democrats say they want to codify Roe, national reproductive rights groups and their allies in Congress see a political window to move beyond Roe’s weak framework and more meaningfully protect abortion access.
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