Joe Gale, a Republican Montgomery County commissioner who has, like Mastriano, positioned himself as a close Trump ally, said in an email that “the heartbeat legislation in Texas is a step in the right direction towards ending the atrocity of abortion.”
As governor, Gale said, he would make it his “utmost priority to protect every child from the moment of conception. Allowing the most defenseless and voiceless among us to be legally murdered in the womb is unacceptable, unethical and unforgivable. Under my leadership, Pennsylvania will be a sanctuary state for innocent unborn life.”
Two Republican state senators who have expressed interest in running for governor, Lancaster County’s Scott Martin and Erie County’s Dan Laughlin, weren’t immediately available for comment. But their votes on previous bills give a picture of their leanings.
Martin voted in favor of both the 2017 dilation and evacuation ban, as well as the 2019 bill banning abortions based on Down syndrome.
Laughlin, who is one of the most moderate members of his caucus and has positioned himself as a potential counter to the generally Trump-aligned gubernatorial field, was one of the only Republicans to vote against both.
‘Hostility to Roe’
It’s still unclear exactly if, or how, Texas’s new law will affect other states.
The rule bans most abortions when a heartbeat is detected. That usually happens around six weeks — before many people know they are pregnant. Texas’s novel approach allows private citizens to sue anyone involved in carrying out an abortion, like a doctor, a person who funds the procedure, or someone who gave the recipient of an abortion a ride to a clinic.
The Supreme Court hasn’t explicitly ruled on it — it merely chose not to block the law from taking effect. But Bruce Ledewitz, a Dusquene University constitutional law professor who follows abortion law closely, said he can’t see any way to interpret the lack of action that doesn’t show that the court is willing to overturn Roe v. Wade or other key legal precedents.
The Roe decision, in 1973, saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule that laws are unconstitutional if they violate a woman’s right to privacy in seeking an abortion, while also saying the state has a role to protect “the potentiality of human life.” The court said that “potentiality” changes during the course of pregnancy and abortion bans are allowed when a fetus is “viable,” which is generally considered to be around 22 to 24 weeks.
Another case, 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, resulted in a similarly influential ruling that states cannot impose an “undue burden” on a person’s right to get an abortion.
The courts have consistently upheld those decisions ever since. But Ledewitz, like many legal experts, says the Texas bill is “obviously” inconsistent with Roe, at the very least.
He notes, the five-justice group that decided not to rule on the Texas law has said it plans to rule on it later, but he believes that “a law like this involving any other subject but abortion would obviously be found unconstitutional and would have been stayed.”
“One can clearly see that it is hostility to Roe that allowed the Texas law to go into effect — that probably means that there’s a five justice majority to overturn Roe, or at least to limit it so restrictively that it will, for all practical purposes, be overturned,” he said.
Republican candidates and legislative staffers haven’t been so willing to make that kind of bold prediction.