On the eve of today’s anti-abortion March for Life, House Republican leaders scrapped Rep. Trent Franks’s Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act — which would have banned abortion after 20 weeks, with an exclusion for women who were raped and reported it to the police — after facing opposition from House Republican women. According to the National Journal, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a lead co-sponsor of the bill, “gave an impassioned speech in conference noting that because of the rape clause, the GOP was again fumbling over this sensitive subject instead of talking about other issues.” (At the Republican National Convention last year, Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway urged lawmakers to “purge the word [rape] from [their] lexicon.”) Rep. Renee Ellmers worried that prioritizing abortion legislation would turn off millennial voters. Ellmers and Rep. Jackie Walorski (pictured) took their names off the bill. Thanks, bbs.
