McConnell vows to give 20-week abortion ban Senate vote

On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told pro-lifers, “I promise you will be getting a vote” on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Associated Press reports.

As Live Action News has previously covered, Congress’s Republican majority greatly angered much of their base in January when GOP Congresswomen Renee Ellmers and Jackie Walorski persuaded House leadership to cancel a vote on the bill, which would ban abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy, due to fears that its rape exception was too burdensome. The rape exception allowed women to get a late-term abortion upon reporting a rape “at any time prior to the abortion to an appropriate law enforcement agency.”

On May 13, the House of Representatives voted 242-184 to pass a modified version that instead requires rape victims seeking late-term abortions to receive counseling 48 hours beforehand.

“It’s about time we begin the process of putting America into the ranks of most other civilized countries by protecting unborn children after 20 weeks in the womb,” McConnell said. The United States is one of just seven countries worldwide where it is legal to obtain an elective abortion past 20 weeks, and “within the top 4% of most permissive abortion policies in the world,” according to a report by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. Many observers on both sides of the abortion debate attribute this discrepancy to Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion’s legality largely out-of-bounds for Congress and state legislatures.