WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Senate Democrats are demanding a vote on legislation to establish a federal grant program to subsidize trips to obtain abortions across state lines using taxpayer dollars in the latest display of how far the party is willing to go to promote abortion-on-demand.
First introduced last year by Democratic U.S. Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Patty Murray of Washington, the Reproductive Health Travel Fund Act would establish a $350 million per year federal grant program “to help ease the financial burden associated with traveling long distances to access safe and legal reproductive health care.”
The U.S. Treasury Department would be authorized to award grant money to pro-abortion organizations that would then dispense it to assist abortion seekers with the costs of round-trip travel, lodging, meals, childcare, translators, doulas, and patient education and information, as well as to make up for wages lost due to missing work.
“Across the country, women have been stripped of the freedom to make their own decisions about their family, their health, and their future,” Baldwin declared Tuesday on the Senate floor. “Judges and politicians have inserted themselves into exam rooms, telling doctors they cannot treat their patients, sometimes even if that treatment would save her life. The rights you have as an American should not depend on the state you live in. If we cannot restore Roe this Congress, we should at the very least extend a lifeline to the millions of women who are unable to access needed care in their own communities.”
The bill has the backing of Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who also took to the Senate floor, claiming that “perhaps, if Amber had access to this fund and could have left Georgia, if she had the federal resources to move quicker to get her care, perhaps she’d be alive.”
.@SenSchumer claims his illegal proposal to pay for Americans’ travel expenses if they get an abortion would have saved the lives of two Georgia women recently killed by abortion pic.twitter.com/RUEmod84Vs
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 24, 2024
Schumer was referring to a Georgia resident named Amber Thurman, who recently became the centerpiece of pro-abortion narratives for dying after taking abortion pills and not receiving emergency treatment for the ensuing sepsis until it was too late. The abortion lobby insists Georgia’s pro-life laws are to blame.
In reality, however, the sepsis for which Thurman needed treatment is a known (albeit rare) potential risk of the abortion pills she was given out of state; Georgia law only prohibits dilation an curettage (D&C) procedures being used to commit abortions, not to remove un-expelled fetal remains after an abortion; and that the original report publicizing her story admitted that the medical staff involved “declined to explain their thinking” as to why they chose not to perform a D&C.
With the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade allowing states to directly ban abortion for the first time in half a century, the activation of broad pro-life laws in 14 states has significantly impacted the surgical abortion business and left an estimated six million reproductive-age women living 200 miles or more from the nearest abortion center. Pro-abortion activists have pursued a variety of strategies to counter the new normal; distributing abortion pills across state lines is one, and subsidizing abortion travel is another.
While Baldwin and Murray’s bill has no chance of passage in the current divided Congress, it offers a preview of what may be in store if Democrats win a unified federal government in this November’s elections.
Vice President and Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris is running on an absolutist abortion-on-demand platform that includes taxpayer funding of abortion, opposing any and all limits on the practice, signing a law forcing all 50 states to permit abortion again, and most recently abolishing the Senate filibuster to get such a law to her desk.