Bills that would severely curtail women's abortion rights have failed in the US states of Nebraska and South Carolina, even though both state legislatures are controlled by Republicans, pointing to growing uncertainty about the political popularity of strict abortion bans. tonight on CNN.
Both proposals failed on the same day, Thursday, without receiving enough votes in the congresses of Nebraska and Carolina, and women from the ranks of the Republican Party also voted against the one in South Carolina.
In Nebraska, the so-called The Heartbeat Act would ban most abortions six months after conception, except in cases of rape, incest or the need to save the mother's life once a "fetal heartbeat" is detected.
However, the Republicans did not have enough votes to overcome the so-called filibuster, or qualified majority to defeat this regulation. Namely, two Republican senators abstained from voting, including the co-sponsor of the law, Merv Rip, who submitted an amendment that the ban should not be introduced after six, but after 12 weeks, but his proposal was not voted on.
Nebraska's Republican governor, Jim Pillen, said he was "deeply disappointed" that the bill had not passed and called it "unacceptable" for senators to be present at the session without voting, and called on Merv Rip to "reconsider" his action and is "sticking to earlier promises regarding the right to life".
Given the outcome of the vote, the law banning abortion after 20 weeks of conception remains in place in Nebraska.
In the South Carolina Senate, the so-called failed. The Human Life Protection Act, which was supposed to completely ban abortion in this federal state, with exceptions in the case of rape and incest. He did not even get a simple majority during the vote - 22 votes were against and 21 were in favor - with five female senators against the bill, including three from the ranks of the Republican Party.
Previously, the proposal was adopted in the lower house of the Congress of South Carolina, but after the vote in the Senate, it will be able to be considered again only next year.
The US Supreme Court, which has been controlled by conservative justices since 2020, last year overturned the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade precedent that guaranteed American women the right to abortion as a federal right. The result was the transfer of regulation to the federal states, which many with Republicans in power used to significantly limit or almost abolish women's right to abortion.
However, suppression of abortion rights turned out to be one of the key reasons for the unexpectedly poor performance of Republicans in last year's midterm elections for the US Congress.
The unpopularity of the Republican attack on the right to abortion was also seen during the voting in individual federal states, and somewhere it caused a counter-effect - in some states, this right was included in their constitutions. Because of this, Republicans faced the question of the political wisdom of continuing to insist on a total or near-total ban on abortion.
Republicans from the House of Representatives, who have a narrow majority in that house of the US Congress after last year's elections, recently gave up on the idea of passing a federal law that would ban the right to abortion in America.
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