Last month, on the eve of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, House Republican leaders canceled a planned vote on a national 20-week abortion ban after Republican women and moderates objected to a provision that would have exempted rape survivors only if they filed a police report on their assault.
In an interview with Janet Parshall on Wednesday, the bill’s author, Rep. Trent Franks, said that the cancellation of the vote was “one of the great disappointments in my life.”
Pinning the change of plans on a “certain group within” the GOP, he lamented, “it’s always the water inside the ship that sinks it.”
Franks, who originally introduced the bill with no exceptions except to save the life of the pregnant woman,told Parshall that he objected to the rape exception in the first place because “none of us have any control over how we’re conceived.” He added that the reporting requirement shouldn’t be a problem because after 20 weeks of pregnancy “most of the questions about sexual assault and all those other questions have been answered long before then.”
According to Eagle Forum, Franks told the group last year that “If I die and Roe v. Wade stands … I will die a failure.”
Earlier in the interview, Franks linked legal abortion in the U.S. with the brutal murder of a Jordanian pilot by the so-called Islamic State, saying, “Whether it’s the Jordanian pilot, whether it’s terrorism, all of the tragedies of the world, generally, are traced back to a lack of compassion for our fellow human beings, a lack of commitment to our fellow human beings.”
“If we don’t have the courage or the will as a country to protect the most innocent of all — children, these little pain-capable unborn babies — if we don’t have the courage to protect them, I am afraid that we will never have the courage or the will to protect any kind of liberty of any sort for this country or for anyone,” he said.
