News
Featured Image
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, SC

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 28, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — After a revolt by Republican women indefinitely delayed the House vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Act, Sen. Lindsey Graham has promised that when he introduces his version in the Senate he will leave out a provision requiring women to report their rapes to the authorities.

“Nobody’s for rape,” Graham told Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.

Republican congresswomen led by Renee Ellmers and Jackie Walorski spiked the vote, which was to take place on the same day as the 2015 March for Life, over a legal mandate that women who wish to abort a child conceived in rape first report that rape to law enforcement. Their defection, and the public relations nightmare of male Republican leadership fighting female Republicans over rape, effectively scuttled the bill's vote last Thursday.

The same provision was in the bill, which passed the House in June 2013, and which Graham introduced in the Senate that November.

Graham said he had little to do with that part of the law. “Somebody in the House put a provision in there: if you didn’t report the rape to law enforcement, then it’s not going to be considered a legitimate rape,” Graham said, calling the language “ridiculous.”

“We’re going to fix it. I really didn’t really pick that up, quite frankly,” he said.

Commentators defended the involvement of law enforcement on the grounds that it protects women from predatory abortionists.“This reporting requirement would keep late-term abortion doctors like Kermit Gosnell or Leroy Carhart from simply checking a box before going ahead with the procedure,” Mollie Hemingway wrote at The Federalist. “Besides, it’s one thing to seek an exception to abortion laws for victims of rape, and entirely another to think that exception must be extended until the baby exits the birth canal.”

In addition to counts of murder and infanticide, Kermit Gosnell was convicted of hundreds of counts of falsifying records to evade Pennsylvania's reporting requirements.

Click “like” if you are PRO-LIFE!

Sen. Graham, who has entertained thoughts of running for president in 2016, remained adamant that the reporting provision would be struck from his bill. “We’re not going to go down that road,” he said.

“I can’t wait for the debate. I’m looking forward to the debate. I want to hear how we’re a better country by aborting babies at 20 weeks,” Graham said.

“I’m looking forward to debate, and I’m going to take the … pro-choice centerpiece, the women’s protection health act. We’re going to bring it up. We’re going to vote on that, too,” he added.

The Women's Health Protection Act is championed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and would nullify hundreds of restrictions on abortion at the state and local level.