Right to abortion threatened in United States: Senate fails to adopt a law guaranteeing it

At a time when the right to abortion is strongly threatened by an upcoming decision of the Supreme Court, this vote was above all symbolic, the Democrats not having the sixty votes out of a hundred necessary to advance on this text

Le Monde with AFP

The initiative was doomed to failure but wanted to be symbolic. At a time when the right to abortion is strongly threatened by an upcoming decision of the Supreme Court, the US Senate failed, Wednesday, May 11, to adopt a law guaranteeing its access throughout the country.

This vote was above all symbolic, the Democrats not having the sixty out of a hundred votes necessary to advance on this text. But it is part of a broader fight of progressives to try to protect the right to abortion.

Around 3 p.m. local hours (8 p.m. in Paris), the hundred senators of the US Congress voted to guarantee, or not, the right to abortion across the United States. “Today’s vote is one of the most important of the next decades,” said the chief of the Democrats in the Senate shortly before the vote, Chuck Schumer.

“Because for the first time in fifty years, a conservative majority, an extreme majority of the Supreme Court is about to decree that women do not have control over their own bodies,” he had alerted, In the hemicycle, the serious tone. The Republicans, themselves, opposed this initiative as a whole, accusing the Democrats, by the voice of their chief Mitch McConnell, of wanting, with this text, to propose “abortions on demand”.

A vote organized by Joe Biden

The party of Joe Biden wanted to organize this vote after the extraordinary flight, on May 2, of a draft decision of the Supreme Court, according to which the American temple of law was preparing to cancel access to abortion.

If the Supreme Court were to cancel the case law which has founded the right to abortion in the United States since 1973, as this week suggested the revelation of a stop project, each State would be free from Prohibit or authorize abortion. About twenty conservative states have already promised to make it illegal.

Since the revelation of this stop project, groups – more or less dense – have come every night to scream their anger in front of the Supreme Court, imposing white marble building now protected by a fence.

The only other option which defenders of the right to abort are currently having to protect it was to modify the rules of the Senate to lower the number of votes necessary to pass such a law.

demonstration on 14 May

Anxious to weigh in the debate, several major progressive organizations called on the Americans to parade on May 14 in all the United States. Four major steps are organized in Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and hundreds of gatherings in the rest of the country.

The American president, Joe Biden, also promised to get involved personally in the battle and urged the Americans to “choose favorable candidates” to the right to abort during the mid-term legislative elections, November 8 .

He thus wishes to expand the majority of Democrats to the Senate, with the hope of being able to pass this federal law protecting access to abortion. But these elections are always very perilous for the power in place, and it is very possible that the Democrats on the contrary lose their thin majorities in the congress during the poll.

/Media reports.