Pa. bill would limit abortion
HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania House approved new restrictions Tuesday on elective abortions after an emotional debate and despite a veto threat from the governor.
The chamber voted 132-65 to ban the procedure after 20 weeks, compared to 24 weeks in current law. It also would criminalize procedures that cause the deaths of fetuses by removing their body parts.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Kathy Rapp, said the dilation-and-evacuation abortion procedure “tears a living human being to pieces.”
“All Pennsylvania mothers and their unborn children deserve far better than this,” said Rapp, R-Warren. “Science agrees and so does the majority of Americans.”
Nine Republicans, nearly all from the Philadelphia suburbs, voted against the bill. Twenty-five Democrats voted “yes.”
Gov. Tom Wolf is threatening to veto the measure if it gets out of the Senate.
Opponents said the bill did not offer exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape and incest. There are exceptions if the procedure would save the mother’s life or prevent impairment of a major bodily function.
“This bill, if it becomes law, would force women to carry pregnancies with horrible fetal abnormalities,” Rep. Leanne Krueger-Braneky, D-Delaware, said.
Others said the measure did not get proper input from doctors because it was crafted without public hearings, warning it would interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.
Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Montgomery, warned of a “return to those dark days of stepping into the shoes of the women and stepping into the shoes of a practitioner and telling other people what to do.”
Supporters in the Republican-majority House said the 20-week limit reflected medical advances that make fetuses viable on their own at earlier stages.
The dilation-and-extraction procedure, which the bill’s supporters termed “dismemberment abortion,” amount to “ripping a baby from its mother’s womb, limb by limb,” said Rep. Judy Ward, R-Blair.
“If this practice were done to animals, people would be outraged,” Ward said.
