LAC News
Democratic Senators Jump Ship Leaving Pregnant Minors Stranded
By Ashley Horne
October 2006

Meet the eight Democratic senators who flip-flopped on their vote to protect pregnant minors last weekend, causing the single most important piece of pro-life legislation in the 109^th Congress – the Child Custody Protection Act (CCPA) (S.403) – to  die on the Senate floor barely hours before Congress recessed. 

• Evan Bayh (Indiana)
• Thomas Carper (Delaware)
• Kent Conrad (North Dakota)
• Byron Dorgan (North Dakota)
• Daniel Inouye (Hawaii)
• Herbert Kohl (Wisconsin)
• Bill Nelson (Florida)
• Ken Salazar (Colorado)

Early last week, things looked hopeful for the bill’s passage.  With a day and a half remaining in the second session of the 109^th Congress, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) made one final valiant push to pass the CCPA.  He filed a “cloture petition” on S. 403, a move that required 60 votes to cut off debate on the bill and then move the bill for final vote.

Pro-family leaders joined Senator Frist and other backers of the bill, working tirelessly down to the last minute to gather enough votes for cloture.  But Democratic senators pulled rank on their own members and lobbied hard to kill this bill. 

CWA is disappointed to report that the Child Custody Protection Act – a bill passed by both the House and the Senate this year and supported by 80% of Americans – failed by three votes.  The final roll call tally was 57-42, with the above-listed eight Democratic senators voting NO on a bill they had previously voted YES for.

It is difficult to see why any senator would oppose a child protection bill.  The bill prohibits the transporting of a minor across state lines to obtain an abortion if it violated the parents’ right to be notified under the home-state law.  It would also have required an abortionist in any state to notify a parent of the minor before performing an abortion on the minor in another state. 

Both the House and the Senate passed their own versions of this legislation earlier in the year.  The House passed the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (H.R. 748) and the Senate passed the Child Custody Protection Act (S. 403).  The bills were then supposed to move into a House-Senate conference committee where they could be reconciled and sent to the president for signing.  For months, however, the Senate Democratic leadership blocked the bill from moving to conference, hoping it would die as the Congressional session came to an end.

In an effort to get around that tactic, the House of Representatives last week again passed the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (now known as S.403) and sent the bill to the Senate.  

Senator Frist’s cloture motion meant that the bill needed 60 votes to cut off debate in the Senate and then allow the bill to move to a full vote.  The Senate had approved the original bill with 65 votes in favor earlier this year – including 14 Democrats.  These Democrats were pressured to change their vote this time around so that the bill would not win the necessary 60 votes for cloture.  The pressure worked. 

More than half of the original 14 Democrats who voted YES on the CCPA earlier this year switched their vote this time in order to kill the CCPA before the recess.

“It is unbelievable that we live in a country where 42 sitting senators voted against legislation to protect young women from being hauled across state lines to terminate a pregnancy without their parents ever having a clue.  It is a sad day for all of us,” said Lanier Swann, CWA’s Director of Government Relations.

CWA supporters are urged to take action on two fronts.  First, if one or both of your senators were among the 57 who voted in favor of cloture, please contact them and say thank you!  Senators must hear from us when they do right just as much as when they do wrong.

Second, if one or both of your senators is one of the eight Democrats who cowardly switched his vote this time around, PLEASE contact him to express your sincere disappointment over his refusal to protect pregnant girls.

SENATE SWITCHBOARD: 202-224-3121.