[Congressional Bills 119th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 12 Introduced in House (IH)]
<DOC>
119th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 12
To protect a person's ability to determine whether to continue or end a
pregnancy, and to protect a health care provider's ability to provide
abortion services.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
June 24, 2025
Ms. Chu (for herself, Ms. Lois Frankel of Florida, Ms. Pressley, Ms.
Escobar, Ms. Adams, Mr. Aguilar, Mr. Amo, Ms. Ansari, Mr. Auchincloss,
Ms. Balint, Ms. Barragan, Mrs. Beatty, Mr. Bell, Mr. Bera, Mr. Beyer,
Mr. Bishop, Ms. Bonamici, Mr. Boyle of Pennsylvania, Ms. Brown, Ms.
Brownley, Ms. Budzinski, Ms. Bynum, Mr. Carbajal, Mr. Carter of
Louisiana, Mr. Casar, Mr. Case, Mr. Casten, Ms. Castor of Florida, Mr.
Castro of Texas, Mrs. Cherfilus-McCormick, Ms. Clark of Massachusetts,
Ms. Clarke of New York, Mr. Cleaver, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Conaway, Mr. Costa,
Ms. Craig, Ms. Crockett, Mr. Crow, Ms. Davids of Kansas, Mr. Davis of
Illinois, Ms. Dean of Pennsylvania, Ms. DeGette, Ms. DeLauro, Ms.
DelBene, Mr. Deluzio, Mr. DeSaulnier, Ms. Dexter, Mrs. Dingell, Mr.
Doggett, Ms. Elfreth, Mr. Evans of Pennsylvania, Mr. Fields, Mrs.
Fletcher, Mr. Foster, Mrs. Foushee, Ms. Friedman, Mr. Frost, Mr.
Garamendi, Ms. Garcia of Texas, Mr. Garcia of California, Mr. Garcia of
Illinois, Ms. Perez, Mr. Golden of Maine, Mr. Goldman of New York, Mr.
Gomez, Ms. Goodlander, Mr. Gottheimer, Mr. Green of Texas, Mrs. Hayes,
Mr. Himes, Mr. Horsford, Ms. Houlahan, Ms. Hoyle of Oregon, Mr.
Huffman, Mr. Ivey, Ms. Jacobs, Ms. Jayapal, Mr. Jeffries, Ms. Johnson
of Texas, Mr. Johnson of Georgia, Ms. Kamlager-Dove, Ms. Kaptur, Mr.
Keating, Ms. Kelly of Illinois, Mr. Kennedy of New York, Mr. Khanna,
Mr. Krishnamoorthi, Mr. Landsman, Mr. Larsen of Washington, Mr. Larson
of Connecticut, Mr. Latimer, Ms. Lee of Pennsylvania, Ms. Lee of
Nevada, Ms. Leger Fernandez, Mr. Levin, Mr. Liccardo, Mr. Lieu, Ms.
Lofgren, Mr. Lynch, Mr. Magaziner, Mr. Mannion, Ms. Matsui, Mrs.
McBath, Ms. McBride, Mrs. McClain Delaney, Ms. McClellan, Ms. McDonald
Rivet, Mr. McGarvey, Mr. McGovern, Mrs. McIver, Mr. Meeks, Mr.
Menendez, Ms. Meng, Mr. Mfume, Ms. Moore of Wisconsin, Mr. Morelle, Ms.
Morrison, Mr. Moskowitz, Mr. Moulton, Mr. Mrvan, Mr. Mullin, Mr.
Nadler, Mr. Norcross, Ms. Norton, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Olszewski, Ms.
Omar, Mr. Pallone, Mr. Panetta, Mr. Pappas, Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Peters, Ms.
Pettersen, Ms. Pingree, Mr. Pocan, Ms. Pou, Mr. Quigley, Mrs. Ramirez,
Mr. Raskin, Mr. Riley of New York, Ms. Rivas, Ms. Ross, Mr. Ruiz, Mr.
Ryan, Ms. Salinas, Ms. Scanlon, Ms. Schakowsky, Mr. Schneider, Ms.
Scholten, Ms. Schrier, Mr. Scott of Virginia, Mr. David Scott of
Georgia, Ms. Sewell, Mr. Sherman, Ms. Sherrill, Ms. Simon, Mr. Smith of
Washington, Mr. Sorensen, Mr. Soto, Ms. Stansbury, Mr. Stanton, Ms.
Stevens, Ms. Strickland, Mr. Subramanyam, Mr. Swalwell, Mrs. Sykes, Mr.
Takano, Mr. Thanedar, Mr. Thompson of California, Mr. Thompson of
Mississippi, Ms. Titus, Ms. Tlaib, Ms. Tokuda, Mr. Tonko, Mrs. Torres
of California, Mrs. Trahan, Mr. Tran, Ms. Underwood, Mr. Vargas, Mr.
Vasquez, Mr. Veasey, Ms. Velazquez, Mr. Vindman, Ms. Wasserman Schultz,
Mrs. Watson Coleman, Mr. Whitesides, Ms. Williams of Georgia, Ms.
Wilson of Florida, Mr. Torres of New York, Mr. Correa, Mr. Espaillat,
Ms. Gillen, Mr. Min, Mr. Courtney, Mr. Cisneros, Ms. Sanchez, Mr.
Neguse, Ms. Waters, and Ms. McCollum) introduced the following bill;
which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in
addition to the Committee on the Judiciary, for a period to be
subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration
of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee
concerned
_______________________________________________________________________
A BILL
To protect a person's ability to determine whether to continue or end a
pregnancy, and to protect a health care provider's ability to provide
abortion services.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Women's Health Protection Act of
2025''.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
Congress finds the following:
(1) Abortion services are essential health care, and access
to those services is central to people's ability to participate
equally in the economic and social life of the United States.
Abortion access allows people who are pregnant to make their
own decisions about their pregnancies, their families, and
their lives.
(2) Reproductive justice requires every individual to have
the right to make their own decisions about having children
regardless of their circumstances and without interference and
discrimination. Reproductive justice is a human right that can
and will be achieved when all people, regardless of actual or
perceived race, color, national origin, immigration status, sex
(including gender identity, sex stereotyping, or sexual
orientation), age, or disability status have the economic,
social, and political power and resources to define and make
decisions about their bodies, health, sexuality, families, and
communities in all areas of their lives, with dignity and self-
determination.
(3) Abortion care, like all health care, is a human right
that should not depend on one's ZIP Code or region, age, actual
or perceived race, national origin, immigration status, sex, or
disability status. Unfortunately, this is the current reality
for millions, creating a patchwork of abortion access across
the United States. Protecting the right to determine whether to
continue or end a pregnancy, and the right of health care
providers to provide abortion care, is necessary and essential
to achieving this human right, and ultimately reproductive
justice.
(4) On June 24, 2022, in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson
Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v.
Wade, reversing decades of precedent recognizing a
constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal
viability.
(5) The effects of the Dobbs decision were immediate and
disastrous. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, many States
imposed near-total bans on abortion. Within 100 days of the
ruling, 66 clinics across 15 States were forced to stop
offering abortions. As of January 2025, abortion is unavailable
in 14 States, leaving 17.98 million women of reproductive age
(ages 15 to 49) as well as transgender and gender nonconforming
individuals without access to abortion in their home State.
(6) Travel time to an abortion clinic, already a burden for
abortion seekers under Roe, has quadrupled since Dobbs. As
distance to an abortion facility increases, so do the
accompanying (and potentially prohibitive) burdens of time off
work or school, lost wages, transportation costs, lodging,
child care costs, and other ancillary costs.
(7) Even before the Dobbs decision, access to abortion
services had long been obstructed across the United States in
various ways, including: prohibitions of, and restrictions on,
insurance coverage; mandatory parental involvement laws;
restrictions that shame and stigmatize people seeking abortion
services; and medically unnecessary regulations that fail to
further the safety of abortion services, but instead cause harm
people by delaying, complicating access to, and reducing the
availability of, abortion services.
(8) Being denied an abortion can have serious consequences
for people's physical, mental, and economic health and well-
being, and that of their families. According to the Turnaway
Study, a longitudinal study published by Advancing New
Standards In Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in 2019, individuals
who are denied a wanted abortion are more likely to experience
economic insecurity than individuals who receive a wanted
abortion. After following participants for five years, the
study found that people who were denied abortion care were more
likely to live in poverty, experience debt, and have lower
credit scores for several years after the denial. These
findings demonstrate that when people have control over when to
have children and how many children to have, their children
benefit through increased economic security and better maternal
bonding.
(9) Abortion bans and restrictions have repercussions for a
broad range of health care beyond pregnancy termination,
including exacerbating the existing maternal health crisis
facing the United States. The United States has the highest
maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation, and Black
women and birthing people face three times the risk of dying
from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts. Even
prior to Dobbs, research found that States that enacted
abortion restrictions based on gestation increased their
maternal mortality rate by 38 percent. Research has found that
a nationwide ban would increase the United States maternal
mortality rate by an additional 24 percent. Furthermore, States
that have banned, are planning to ban, or have severely
restricted abortion care have fewer maternal health providers,
more maternity-care deserts, higher rates of both maternal and
infant mortality, and greater racial inequity in health care.
(10) Abortion bans and restrictions additionally harm
people's health by reducing access to other essential health
care services offered by many of the providers targeted by the
restrictions, including--
(A) screenings and preventive services, including
contraceptive services;
(B) testing and treatment for sexually transmitted
infections;
(C) LGBTQ health services; and
(D) referrals for primary care, intimate partner
violence prevention, prenatal care, and adoption
services.
(11) This ripple effect has only worsened since the Dobbs
decision. Clinicians and pharmacists have denied access to
essential medication for conditions, including gastric ulcers
and autoimmune diseases, because those drugs are also used for
medication abortion care. Patients are reporting being denied
or delayed in their receipt of necessary and potentially
lifesaving treatment for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriage
management because of the newfound legal risks facing
providers.
(12) Reproductive justice seeks to address restrictions on
reproductive health, including abortion, that perpetuate
systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white
supremacy, and anti-Black racism. This violent legacy has
manifested in policies including enslavement, rape, and
experimentation on Black women; forced sterilizations, medical
experimentation on low-income women's reproductive systems; and
the forcible removal of Indigenous children. Access to
equitable reproductive health care, including abortion
services, has always been deficient in the United States for
Black, Indigenous, Latina/x, Asian-American and Pacific
Islander, and People of Color (BIPOC) and their families.
(13) The legacy of restrictions on reproductive health,
rights, and justice is not a dated vestige of a dark history.
Data show the harms of abortion-specific restrictions fall
especially heavily on people with low incomes, people of color,
immigrants, young people, people with disabilities, and those
living in rural and other medically underserved areas. Abortion
bans and restrictions are compounded further by the ongoing
criminalization of people who are pregnant, including those who
are incarcerated, living with HIV, or with substance-use
disorders. These populations already experience health
disparities due to social, political, and environmental
inequities, and restrictions on abortion services exacerbate
these harms. Removing bans and restrictions on abortion
services would constitute one important step on the path toward
realizing reproductive justice by ensuring that the full range
of reproductive health care is accessible to all who need it.
(14) Abortion bans and restrictions are tools of gender
oppression, as they target health care services that are used
primarily by women. These paternalistic bans and restrictions
rely on and reinforce harmful stereotypes about gender roles
and women's decisionmaking, undermining their ability to
control their own lives and well-being. These restrictions harm
the basic autonomy, dignity, and equality of women.
(15) The terms ``woman'' and ``women'' are used in this
bill to reflect the identity of the majority of people targeted
and most directly affected by bans and restrictions on abortion
services, which are rooted in misogyny. However, access to
abortion services is critical to the health of every person
capable of becoming pregnant. This Act is intended to protect
all people with the capacity for pregnancy--cisgender women,
transgender men, nonbinary individuals, those who identify with
a different gender, and others--who are unjustly harmed by
restrictions on abortion services.
(16) Pregnant individuals will continue to experience a
range of pregnancy outcomes, including abortion, miscarriage,
stillbirths, and infant losses regardless of how the State
attempts to exert power over their reproductive decisionmaking,
and will continue to need support for their health and well-
being through their reproductive lifespans.
(17) Evidence from the United States and around the globe
bears out that criminalizing abortion invariably leads to
arrests, investigations, and imprisonment of people who end
their pregnancies or experience pregnancy loss, leading to
violations of fundamental rights to liberty, dignity, bodily
autonomy, equality, due process, privacy, health, and freedom
from cruel and inhumane treatment.
(18) All major experts in public health and medicine, such
as the American Medical Association, American Public Health
Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Society
of Addiction Medicine, and American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists, oppose the criminalization of pregnancy
outcomes because the threat of being subject to investigation
or punishment through the criminal legal system when seeking
health care threatens pregnant people's lives and undermines
public health by deterring people from seeking care for
obstetrical emergencies.
(19) Anti-abortion stigma that is compounded by abortion
bans and restrictions also contributes to violence and
harassment that put both people seeking and people providing
abortion care at risk. From 1977 to 2022, there were 11
murders, 42 bombings, 200 acts of arson, 531 assaults, 375
burglaries, and thousands of other incidents of criminal
activity directed at abortion seekers, providers, volunteers,
and clinic staff. This violence existed under Roe and has been
steadily escalating for years. The presence of dangerous
protestors and organized extremists acts as yet another barrier
to abortion care, and this threat has become even more urgent
as abortion bans proliferate and stigma around abortion care
increases.
(20) Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures in
the United States. An independent, comprehensive review of the
state of science on the safety and quality of abortion
services, published by the National Academies of Medicine in
2018, found that abortion in the United States is safe and
effective and that the biggest threats to the quality of
abortion services in the United States are State regulations
that create barriers to care. Such abortion-specific
restrictions, as well as broader State bans, conflict with
medical standards and are not supported by the recommendations
and guidelines issued by leading reproductive health care
professional organizations, including the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society of Family
Planning, the National Abortion Federation, the World Health
Organization, and others.
(21) For over 20 years, medication abortion care has been
available in the United States as a safe, effective, Food and
Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatment to end an early
pregnancy. Today, medication abortion care accounts for 63
percent of all pregnancy terminations in the United States;
however, significant barriers to access remain in place,
particularly in States that have imposed onerous restrictions
that conflict with FDA's regulation of medication abortion.
Additionally, opponents of abortion are now deploying new
tactics to limit access to this FDA-approved medication that
would set a dangerous precedent for the Federal regulation of
medication products and have national repercussions.
(22) Health care providers are subject to licensing laws in
various jurisdictions, which are not affected by this Act
except as expressly provided in this Act.
(23) International human rights law recognizes that access
to abortion is intrinsically linked to the rights to life,
health, equality and nondiscrimination, privacy, and freedom
from ill treatment. United Nations (UN) human rights treaty
monitoring bodies have found that legal abortion services, like
other reproductive health care services, must be available,
accessible, affordable, acceptable, and of good quality. UN
human rights treaty bodies have condemned criminalization of
abortion and medically unnecessary barriers to abortion
services, including mandatory waiting periods, biased
counseling requirements, and third-party authorization
requirements.
(24) Core human rights treaties ratified by the