Just days before Rep. Cori Bush lost her primary, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark lauded her as “a leading voice” on reproductive health access, during a roundtable with abortion rights advocates in Bush’s district in Missouri.
“That’s the power that Cori Bush brings to this issue. She shares her own story so people see themselves in her,” Clark said.
Now, lawmakers and abortion rights advocates, girding against the conservative movement’s next assaults on reproductive health access, say they will feel Bush’s absence, worried they are losing allies who personally understand abortions in the face of a possible second Trump administration.
Bush, who has talked about how she had an abortion after being raped as a teen, lost her race to Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor backed by a super PAC allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC also successfully targeted fellow progressive House “squad” member Rep. Jamaal Bowman in his race in June.
Bell said he supports abortion rights. But his affiliations with Republicans have raised concerns that he will not be as staunch a supporter of the cause. Republican donors backed his campaign and he himself managed the 2006 House campaign of anti-abortion Republican Mark Byrne (a spokesperson for Bell told HuffPost that Bell ran Byrne’s campaign as a “longtime friend” of the candidate).
Bush, meanwhile, introduced multiple bills on abortion access, including one to repeal the Comstock Act, an 1800s federal law that Donald Trump’s allies believe should be enacted as a national ban in a second Trump administration. At the time, major abortion rights groups were warning against highlighting the issue.
“Rep. Bush was a woman warrior for justice, and the courage it took for her to share her abortion story made an impact on our movement. Her leadership and the activist lens she brought to Congress will certainly be sorely missed,” outgoing Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus and a lawmaker who has also shared her own abortion story, said in a statement. “As one of the members of Congress who has been open about my own abortion story, and who will be moving on to a new chapter, I know how valuable that perspective can be.”
A total of seven lawmakers in Congress have come forward about their own abortion stories, and with Bush and Lee not returning to the House next term, only three will remain: Sen. Gary Peters and Reps. Gwen Moore and Pramila Jayapal. Two, former Reps. Jackie Speier and Marie Newman, have already left Congress.
Newman told NOTUS it was a “shame” that Bush and Lee were leaving because they were both women who “really, really understood” their districts and whose constituents could identify with, particularly those who had experienced abortions. In Bush’s case, Newman said she found it “very, very hard to believe that [Bell] will be as in tune, engaged, understand the district and be in alignment on issues.”
“Anytime a strong proponent of reproductive freedom leaves the House, I think it’s problematic,” said Newman, who got to Congress in 2020 after defeating Dan Lipinski, one of the last anti-abortion Democrats left in Congress. “Even if a man replaces her that said that they support [abortion rights], it’s not that that male has any bad intentions, they will just not fight the same way.” (Lateefah Simon, a Black woman, is leading the race to replace Lee.)
Prominent abortion rights advocate Renee Bracey Sherman said Bush leaving was “devastating” because she’s being replaced by someone who does not have a “record” of protecting abortion rights.
“I think that this is an enormous loss for us as a nation, and for her to be replaced by somebody who was funded by anti-abortion politicians that is pretending to be an abortion advocate, like it’s not real,” Sherman said. For him “to run to and say that, like, he’s just as good an abortion as her, when she’s someone who’s actually had a fucking abortion, that is insulting.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, another “squad” member, said that Bush and Lee have been “steady, effective legislators and messengers on abortion justice” who have made it so they “talk more directly about the various circumstances where abortion care is sought and press back on misinformation and harmful attacks that limit access to this basic health care.”
It remains unclear whether the bills Bush has personally introduced would be brought back in future congressional terms.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, called Bush “one of the strongest advocates for abortion rights in the House” in a statement to NOTUS. She added that the organization is “saddened that Congress is losing such a vocal and unwavering proponent of reproductive freedom and justice.”
—
Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.