In 2021, Consultant Michelle Metal, a California Republican whose district President Biden received in 2020, cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, a invoice to acknowledge a fertilized egg as an individual with equal protections underneath the 14th Modification.
It was a yr earlier than the Supreme Courtroom would overturn Roe v. Wade. Ms. Metal was one among 166 Home Republicans — then roughly three-quarters of the convention — who would finally signal on to the laws, which amounted to a nationwide abortion ban. She did so simply weeks after it was launched.
For Republicans on the time, the sweeping potential influence of the invoice was not seen as problematic. With Roe v. Wade, which acknowledged a constitutional proper to an abortion because the legislation of the land, the measure may have little sensible impact. It was largely a gesture of help for the anti-abortion motion, a significant supply of political backing for the G.O.P. And Democrats, who managed the Home on the time, would by no means deliver it up for a vote anyway.
By final yr, when Home Republicans launched an identical laws, the panorama had modified significantly. The Supreme Courtroom’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Group overturned Roe, setting off a race by many states to impose extreme restrictions, and abortion bans turned a politically poisonous challenge for Republicans in elections throughout the nation. The G.O.P. additionally was again in charge of the Home, if solely narrowly, with the facility to regulate what got here to the ground.
