Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a subcommittee hearing titled: “Protecting Roe: Why We Need the Women’s Health Protection Act.”
As expected, the hearing included testimony from multiple pro-abortion speakers who claimed that unrestricted, unregulated access to abortion is essential “health care” for women.
In a nutshell, the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) would invalidate almost all state laws that explicitly regulate abortion. The bill goes so far as to list specific categories of existing state laws that would be invalidated. Among these are common-sense regulations like parental notice requirements for minors seeking abortion and laws outlawing abortions for reasons of race, sex, and genetic abnormalities like Down syndrome.
In the view of WHPA’s supporters, abortion must be treated as a sacred procedure, and the reality of the unique, life-altering and life-ending implications of abortion must be ignored. As a matter of fact, the bill’s text puts abortion in the same category as mundane procedures like colonoscopies.
This irrational categorization of abortion is devastating both to women and their unborn babies.
While claiming to protect women’s health, this legislation fails to acknowledge the physical and mental toll abortion has on women—to say nothing of the unborn female lives being aborted.
Furthermore, the WHPA claims that abortion is necessary health care for women because without it, women would not be able to participate on equal footing with men in society and the workplace.
Actually, I take that back—the bill claims that abortion is necessary health care for a “person who is pregnant.”
That’s right—despite claiming to be a bill that protects women’s health, the WHPA includes gender-neutral language when referring to women, like “person capable of becoming pregnant” and “a person’s ability to terminate a pregnancy.”
Let’s say that again: gender-neutral language to refer to women. How can one claim to protect women while refusing to acknowledge that women exist as a category?
Unfortunately, the extreme nature of WHPA and its gender-blind language come as no surprise under this Congress and the Biden administration. The bill’s introduction comes on the heels of President Biden’s exclusion of the overwhelmingly bipartisan Hyde Amendment in his budget proposal, as well as administration policies that allow men who identify as women to compete against female athletes, live in women’s dorms, and sleep in women’s shelters.
By pandering to the abortion industry and its activists, President Biden and supporters of the WHPA are endangering women under the guise of health care. The Women’s Health Protection Act neither promotes women’s health nor protects women. In fact, it actually erases women as a category.
Women deserve better.
Natalie Allen worked as a lobbyist at the Family Foundation of Virginia and a grassroots associate at Heritage Action for America before joining the Alliance Defending Freedom team.
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