CV NEWS FEED // A majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus signed a Tuesday letter urging the Senate Appropriations Committee Chair and Vice-Chair to pass spending bills without pro-life protections or protections for minors against so-called “gender-affirming care.”
“Partisan, discriminatory, and harmful policy riders have no place in appropriations bills,” the senators wrote. “Unfortunately, the House appropriations bills are filled with new highly partisan provisions, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ riders, that should be removed from any final appropriations bills.”
The liberal lawmakers claimed that the United States is “facing a reproductive health care crisis.” Various state-level pro-life laws, they argued,
leave 1 in 3 women, as well as transgender and nonbinary people, without access to abortion and disproportionately impact people of color, people with disabilities, young people, people living in rural areas, and people with low incomes.
The senators went on to call House Republicans’ efforts to restrict chemical abortion “medically unnecessary.” Proposed pro-life protections in spending bills “would seriously undermine pregnant people’s ability to make decisions about their bodies and providers’ ability to provide necessary care,” the Democrats argued.
“At the same time, House Republicans have used the appropriations process to push extremist anti-LGBTQ+ measures, which threaten to disrupt the lives and fundamental dignity of the LGBTQ+ community,” the letter continued:
Seven of the House’s twelve appropriations bills also contain dangerous riders that ban access to gender-affirming care, which would deprive transgender people of medically necessary and often life-saving healthcare.
A total of 45 senators signed the letter. Forty-three of the signatories were Democrats. The other two were left-wing independents Sen. Angus King, I-ME, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, who both caucus with the Democratic Party.
A press release from the office of signatory Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT, indicated that several pro-abortion and pro-LGBTQ activist groups endorsed the letter, including:
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Guttmacher Institute, Human Rights Campaign, National Center for Transgender Equality, National Council of Jewish Women, National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, National Women’s Law Center, Physicians for Reproductive Health, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America), Whitman-Walker Institute.
>> CONGRESS REMOVES PRO-LIFE PROTECTIONS FROM DEFENSE BILL <<
Two weeks ago, CatholicVote reported that “Congress removed an amendment that would have ended the Department of Defense’s (DoD) controversial pro-abortion policy from their draft version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).”
“A draft version of the NDAA unveiled Thursday by the Senate and House Armed Services committees says House Republicans who passed the amendment over the summer agreed to drop the provision,” The Hill wrote at the time.
