The United States Senate again knocked down this Wednesday, as it did last February, the Democratic bill that sought to ensure the right to abortion in the face of the prohibition legislation imposed by the Republican states and in the face of the announced Supreme Court ruling against the federal doctrine that had been protecting the free interruption of pregnancy since 1973.
The failure, by 49 votes in favor and 51 against, was assured by the Republican votes plus that of the already accredited disloyal right-wing Democrat who is West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin: the man who has embittered President Joe Biden’s mandate by ruin their main social projects. Approval would have required 60 votes in favor of the text; that is, 11 more than the project harvested.
Despite the forecast of a majority against, the leaders of the Democratic group in the Upper House had an interest in the senators opposed to the right to abortion being portrayed before a public opinion that mostly defends, according to all the polls carried out in recent years, the women’s free choice.
There are six months to go until the mid-term legislative elections, in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are renewed, and this is an issue that Joe Biden’s party wants, and needs, to exploit to the fullest.
“Republicans will have to go on record if they want this to be the first generation of American women with less freedom than their mothers,” Washington Senator Patty Murray, a member of the team leading the Democratic ranks in the Senate, had said.
The Vice President of the Government and President of the Senate, Kamala Harris, went to the Upper House to exercise this second position, as a sign of the importance that she and her family attach to the matter.
Numerous Democratic members of the House of Representatives and their aides also marched through the Capitol, before the vote, to call on senators to support the text.
The bill not only sought to protect the right to abortion as guaranteed until now by the doctrine established 49 years ago by the Supreme Court in the Roe vs. wade; In addition, the new norm would have made clear the legality of the interruption of pregnancy with medication, among other novelties, through a mandatory federal statute for medical services throughout the country.
Such federal legislation would have superseded the laws that 26 Republican states are planning to pass, or even already in force, to prohibit or restrict abortion as much as possible.
The finally defeated project would also have fought the sentence that five of the six judges of the conservative majority of the Supreme Court (made up of a total of nine magistrates) plan to issue in the coming months, probably in June. The draft of this ruling was leaked last week by the newspaper Politico through an unusual leak whose content the court itself ended up confirming a few hours later.
The abortion war continues in the United States. And it goes to more.
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