Trent Franks’s Abortion Bill Passes the House, With One Last Gaffe

Now that Trent Franks's 20-week abortion ban has passed the House, it stands no chance in the Senate. So the debate before its 228-196 passage was probably the last opportunity for the bill's supporters (and its opponents) to get in some grandstanding on this bit of legislation. This is probably just as well for Franks, who last week said the "incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy (is) very low," to no shortage of criticism. Franks has since been sidelined, and while the commentary from representatives on both sides was less controversial this week, it was not without its batty moments.

As debate on the bill started, Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican supporter from Texas and a former OB/GYN, appeared to argue that fetuses in the womb were conscious because they masturbate: "They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?" It's not the world's biggest gaffe, but it gets "masturbating fetus" into a headline.

That's just the kind of thing Dave Weigel was on about in Slate Tuesday evening:  that Democrats love to point to problematic Republican science in these debates. And point they did. "Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding about basic women’s healthcare, and this bill is just one more example of their continuing attack on women’s rights," said Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat.

The bill was never going to get to President Obama's desk, and he said he'd veto it anyway, so it's not like it's a viable threat to Roe v. Wade. But it does show us what the new abortion debate will look like: gaffey.

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What Would Happen If Rep. Trent Franks’s Abortion Ban Passed?

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee approved Arizona representative Trent “Little Women” Franks's Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act today, a bill inspired by the Kermit Gosnell case that would ban abortions after twenty weeks, when some studies suggest a fetus can feel pain. The committee hearing yielded June’s first GOP rape gaffe, when Franks argued against Democrat-proposed exceptions for rape and incest. “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low,” the congressman said, echoing Todd Akin. He later clarified in a statement that he meant that late-term abortions of pregnancies resulting from rape are rare.

A similar bill recently failed in the House, but hypothetically speaking, what would be the effects of such legislation, which would limit women's Roe-protected right to an abortion until viability, or 24 weeks?

Conveniently, The New York Times Magazine has published a big story on just that. Today. It traces University of California San Francisco demographer Diana Green Foster’s long-term study of abortion, the first to compare the effects of having an abortion to the effects of being denied an abortion, a.k.a. the “turnaways,” most often because of gestational limits in state laws similar to the one Franks has proposed. It's not good: Turnaways had higher rates of hypertension and chronic pelvic pain and were three times more likely to end up below the federal poverty line two years later. Motherhood, Stephanie Coontz wrote in the New York Times this week, “is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender in the United States.”

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