House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said the draft Supreme Court opinion that shows a majority of justices favor overturning Roe v. Wade “slapped women in the face.”
“Here we are on Mother’s Day, a week where this court has slapped women in the face in terms of disrespect for their judgment about the size and timing of their families,” Pelosi told moderator Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“So the fact is, let’s keep our eye on the ball. The ball is in the court of those justices, one of them at least said over and over again,” she added.
The Speaker said the debate over abortion rights is “so serious and so personal and so disrespectful of women.”
Pelosi’s comments came less than one week after Politico published a draft Supreme Court ruling, revealing that a majority of justices had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court said the leaked document was “authentic” but underscored that it is not a final decision by the high court.
Democrats on Capitol Hill are now scrambling to pass legislation that will codify Roe v. Wade in anticipation of the Supreme Court rolling back the nearly 50-year precedent. The House passed legislation in September, but Senate Republicans blocked the bill in February.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said he will force a vote on the legislation next week. The push, though, is likely to fail.
Some Democrats are starting to get frustrated by the lack of action to address abortion rights on the federal level, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
“Where is the Democratic Party? Where’s the party? Why aren’t we calling this out? This is a concerted, coordinated effort. And, yes, they’re winning. We need to stand up. Where’s the counteroffensive?” Newsom said.
Asked by Brennan why pro-abortion rights Democrats were outmaneuvered, Pelosi knocked the fellow California Democrat without mentioning him by name.
“The fact is that we had been fighting for a woman’s right to choose and that is to choose. We have been fighting against the Republicans in the Congress constantly because the fact is they are not just anti-woman’s right to choose in terms of terminating a pregnancy but in terms of access to contraception and family planning and the rest, both domestically and globally,” Pelosi said.
“This is a constant fight that we’ve had for generations — decades, I should say, in my case, in the Congress, and the, we had been bipartisan early on, support for a woman’s right to choose, until the politics have changed, and that’s what happened in the court. The science hasn’t changed, the, but the court changed, and therefore they’re deciding that it will be different,” she added.
The Speaker then took a jab at Newsom, telling Brennan, “I have no idea why anybody would make that statement unless they were unaware of the fight that has been going on.”
Newsom and Pelosi were related at one point — the governor’s aunt Barbara Newsom was married to Pelosi’s brother-in-law Ron Pelosi for a few years before divorcing, according to ABC7.