All seems calm one spring afternoon on Capitol Hill. Storms whipping up tornadoes are building miles away, but it’s business as usual at the Carol Whitehall Moses Center, Planned Parenthood’s busiest health care facility in the Washington, D.C. region.
Patients scheduled for abortions or routine health care are checking in, getting routed to the clinic’s waiting rooms, labs, nurses’ stations or recovery rooms. The facility provides medication abortion to between 12 to 15 patients a day and 20 to 25 by surgery in the first trimester, according to my guide, Monisha Williams.
“Our patients come from D.C., Maryland and Virginia,” she notes, along with the newcomers flocking to the District that now live in the apartments and condominiums sprouting up around the health care center. And if abortion were banned in the District of Columbia, where would they go? “That’s a question we might have to answer,” says Williams.
In a move that was both stunning and expected, the Supreme Court last week repealed a woman’s right to abortion under federal law, leaving the matter up to the states. But what happens to those who don’t live in a state? As the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. is a federal district with limited self-government under the 1973 Home Rule Act. The Constitution bestows Congress with the ultimate power to govern the District.
That power sharing over the past 49 years — though tested annually on hot-button issues like gun rights, marijuana legalization and abortion — has gradually given the District greater autonomy, especially over its budget. But that may be about to change. The hard right turn of the Republican Party, along with the likely prospect that the GOP could win control of at least one house of Congress in November’s midterm elections, has the potential to strip the District of its authority.
Some conservative Republicans are already vowing to introduce legislation banning abortion in D.C. They succeeded years ago at prohibiting D.C. from using federal or local tax dollars to fund abortions. Now one of the most vocal is Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.). He says that the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade will be “at the forefront” of his focus next Congress, adding in an email, “I look forward to ending D.C.’s failed experiment of Home Rule once and for all.”
“The District is under attack in every single session, but this is a particularly treacherous moment,” says Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s non-voting delegate in the House. “It presents a unique threat to the right to abortions.”
Washington, of course, is one of the bluest spots on the political map. Democrats out-register Republicans by 77 percent to 5. “The GOP is non-existent in the District,” says veteran political operative Tom Lindenfeld. “Even the two most recent office-holders elected as Republicans renounced their association with the party.”
This sets up the prospect of an epic clash between congressional Republicans bent on limiting the right to abortion against a federal city where providing abortions is considered a bedrock right to health care. It also leaves GOP lawmakers open to accusations of hypocrisy, for trumpeting the Supreme Court’s ruling that abortion laws are “returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
“How can they at once say they want to return decision-making back to the localities and proceed to ban abortion in the District of Columbia, where the will of the people clearly comes down on the side of protecting the right to abortion?” asks Dr. Laura Meyers, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington
Bo Shuff, the longtime executive director of DC Vote, the leading advocacy organization for D.C. becoming the 51st state, is more somber.
“If Congress gets hellbent on banning abortion in D.C.,” he says, “there’s very little the people or officials in the District can do — beyond providing bus trips to Maryland.”
