The Republican-controlled Senate, faced with procedural disputes and intraparty debate over details of the measure, abruptly adjourned until Tuesday. Chaos spilled into public view on the Senate floor, but it neither definitively advanced nor sank the proposal that is the nation’s most far-reaching effort to curb abortion this year.
The measure would effectively ban most abortions at every stage of pregnancy and criminalize the procedure for doctors, who could face up to 99 years in prison for performing an abortion unless a woman’s health was at “serious” risk. On Thursday, in a maneuver that helped set off a chorus of shouts and screams on the Senate floor, some Republicans sought to abandon provisions that would have allowed exceptions to the abortion ban in cases of rape or incest.
The House has already passed a measure without such exceptions, and a Senate committee added them Wednesday, stirring anger from some who thought they watered down the effort to ban abortion as broadly as possible and to force a new look at Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that legalized abortion up to the point when a fetus is viable outside the womb, usually about 24 weeks into a pregnancy. Although the Senate removed the exceptions Thursday, the provision could be restored before a final vote.
In the end, with the Alabama chamber in turmoil and even senior lawmakers flabbergasted, Thursday served as a preview of the debate that will play out once the bill returns to the Senate floor as soon as next week.
Democrats have complained the measure would nearly eliminate abortion rights in Alabama, and they have argued that lawmakers should spend more time on the state’s most pressing issues, not national cultural battles. But they have conceded that the bill is very likely to pass the Legislature.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.