- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outlined her party's early legislative response to Roe v. Wade being overturned.
- Pelosi said the party will look at protecting sensitive reproductive health data and the right to travel.
- She also wants to try to codify Roe into law, but previous efforts to do so have failed.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday outlined House Democrats' legislative response to Roe v. Wade being overturned, saying her party is looking at codifying a federal right to an abortion.
Pelosi outlined three areas that House Democrats are examining just days after the Supreme Court gutted federal abortion rights, overturning nearly over a half-century of precedent. These are: protecting sensitive data on reproductive health apps, making it clear that states cannot stop people from traveling to seek an abortion, and once again trying to pass a federal law guaranteeing a right to an abortion.
"While this extremist Supreme Court works to punish and control the American people, Democrats must continue our fight to expand freedom in America," Pelosi wrote in a letter to her Democratic colleagues. "Doing so is foundational to our oath of office and our fidelity to the Constitution."
Pelosi does not outline the specific legislation under consideration, but some lawmakers already introduced bills on the topic. Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat from California, introduced the "My Body, My Data Act" on June 2, which would task the Federal Trade Commission with enforcing a national privacy standard for period-tracking apps. A companion Senate bill has 11 lawmakers lined up behind it, but crucially, there are not yet any Senate Republicans that support it.
Period tracking apps themselves have taken steps to try to protect user data, Insider previously reported.
The lack of Republican support is vitally critical to any legislative action passing. The Senate filibuster effectively requires almost all legislation, including abortion rights, to have 60 votes. This means that Senate Democrats need to unanimously support any measure in addition to attracting 10 GOP senators into the fold.
It's not a given that Democrats will unanimously line up behind abortion rights either. Sen. Joe Manchin, a central from West Virginia, thought that the party's bill to guarantee federal abortion rights, The Women's Health Protection Act, went too far. He joined almost all Senate Republicans in opposing it in May.
Last week's Supreme Court decision doesn't make abortion illegal nationwide. Rather, the court ruled that states can now step in to determine what restrictions to impose, with at least eight states now having abortion bans three days after the ruling. Some Republican state lawmakers have made clear that they are not content with just effectively banning the procedure within their own borders.
In Missouri, state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, who helped author the state's "trigger ban" without exceptions for rape and incest, has also pushed legislation that would allow private individuals to sue Missouri residents if they go outside of the state to get an abortion.
Coleman wants to stop what she calls "abortion tourism."
"It's one of those phrases that really describes what I think we're going to be seeing and certainly what we have already started to see, which is states that are really catering to providing abortions to residents of states that have no abortion access," Coleman told NPR. "And so there's a direct targeting that's taking place into pro-life states."