Pa. House caps 2025 with lengthy debate, passage of proposed abortion rights referendum

On a near-party-line vote, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill that would put a referendum before voters on adding specific abortion rights language to the state constitution.

The bill — and the more than two hours of floor remarks that accompanied its passage — capped off 2025 for the state legislature, with neither the House nor Senate expected to take votes until January.

Wednesday’s action was a fitting end for another year of divided government between the state’s Democratic-majority House and Republican-majority Senate, featuring a lengthy debate over an emotional issue that will almost certainly go nowhere in the opposing chamber.

The measure “will not be taken up by the Senate,” said House Minority Leader Jesse Topper, R-Bedford County, lamenting that, on the abortion issue, “we continue to grow this divide amongst our people in ways that don’t really take into account the mother or the child.”

But the political headwinds aren’t a reason to not put something on the table, Democrats said, given the situation since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned the abortion rights found in the Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey precedents.

“Dobbs changed everything,” said House Majority Leader Matt Bradford, D-Montgomery County, given that there is now nothing preventing Pennsylvania from enacting drastic restrictions on abortion, as many other states have done since 2022.

The bill in question, Bradford stressed, would give voters the option to enshrine their pre-Dobbs rights into the state constitution, so that “it will not be removed by the acts of any one legislative majority or governor” in the future.

The proposed constitutional language that would go before the voters states that “every individual has the fundamental right to exercise personal reproductive liberty,” including the choice to end a pregnancy, use contraceptives, or receive fertility care, and that the commonwealth “may not deny, burden, infringe upon or abridge this right unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”

Further, the amendment reads that “the commonwealth may regulate the provision of abortion care after fetal viability, except that in no circumstance shall the commonwealth prohibit an abortion that, in the professional judgment of an attending health care professional, is medically indicated to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual,” with “fetal viability” further defined as the point where “there is a significant likelihood of the fetus’s sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.”

The ”fetal viability” concept mimics the one that was previously established federally by the Roe and Casey court precedents, which had largely prevented states from limiting abortion access before the viability point. That standard still remains in place via Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act, which places restrictions on abortion care only after a viability point of 24 weeks.

But since Dobbs, there is no longer a federal mandate preventing states from enacting tighter restrictions — thus the need for constitutional language that “restores rights once guaranteed, rights that shaped the lives of millions of women and families,” said Rep. Maureen Madden, D-Monroe County.

Republicans’ concerns fell into two broad categories. Several made expressly religious objections, with a few even suggesting that religious morality and governmental authority should be one and the same.

“God is the author of life, and in that vein, we cannot put God in a silo and pretend that we can ignore basic morality by claiming separation of church and state or saying that we are just representing our constituencies,” said Rep. Barb Gleim, R-Cumberland County.

Others said that — regardless of one’s personal position on abortion — the language of the proposed constitutional amendment was excessively vague. Many had a specific issue with the clause indicating that the state could not restrict abortion even post-viability if such a procedure was “medically indicated” for physical or mental health.

The clause “defers entirely to the judgment of a healthcare professional” without defining any concrete standards for them to follow, said Rep. Kate Klunk, R-York County. That could give virtually anyone the grounds to challenge the existing Abortion Control Act based on vague claims that the restrictions therein harmed their mental health, Klunk and others reasoned.

As Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster County, pointed out, the Abortion Control Act continues to be challenged, including in an ongoing case seeking to nullify the act’s ban on Medicaid dollars being used for abortion services.

Further challenges enabled by the new constitutional language “would completely nullify all of the safety standards and remove the strict scrutiny balance test that is currently in place” by the courts, Cutler said. Several of his colleagues predicted that the result would be rampant late-term abortions up until the time of birth.

Democrats said these fears were vastly overstated and that the greater risk was not that the courts would construe the language too broadly, but that future conservative lawmakers would use Dobbs to effectuate an abortion ban far earlier than the current 24 weeks.

“When I hear rhetoric about Nazis and murder,” Bradford said, referring to a previous speaker comparing abortion to the Holocaust, “I’m pretty sure that these people are not interested in the status quo of the law in this commonwealth.”

If Republicans were to re-take total control of state government, Bradford continued, “Does anyone doubt that that Republican leadership — who uses terms that we heard on this floor today — would move immediately on the Abortion Control Act and the right to abortion care on day one?” The result, he and other Democrats said, would likely be near-total prohibition.

For now, this discussion — at least as it pertains to the amendment itself — is almost certainly moot.

The language of constitutional amendments must be passed by both chambers of the legislature in two consecutive sessions before it is put to the voters on the next ballot. As Topper noted, the Republican-led Senate has no reason to call a vote on language that passed the House in a highly partisan manner.

Sessions are the two years between legislative elections. Even if Democrats won a majority in both chambers next year and passed the abortion rights language in the 2027-28 session, that language would have to pass a second time in 2029 — putting the actual referendum three-and-a-half years away at the earliest.

The final vote on Wednesday was 102-to-101. Two Republicans from more liberal-leaning districts — Rep. Joe Hogan, R-Bucks County, and Rep. K.C. Tomlinson, R-Bucks County — broke with their party to vote in favor. Two Democrats from more conservative districts — Rep. Frank Burns, D-Cambria County, and Rep. Anita Kulik, D-Allegheny County — voted against.

Said State Rep. Barb Gleim, R-Cumberland County, on Wednesday during debate on a bill related to abortion rights: '“God is the author of life, and in that vein, we cannot put God in a silo and pretend that we can ignore basic morality by claiming separation of church and state or saying that we are just representing our constituencies.'

AMEN, sister!

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Is there or was there anybody who tried putting a right to life to a referendum? (PA state Const.)

The interesting thing would be if so(or future) that both abortion and life ended up affirmed by strong majorities.

I am not aware of any elected official advancing a RTL referendum.

There are strong ProLive advocacy organizations but I suspect that they will wait for the abortion-on-demand initiative to crash and burn before advancing a constitutional amendment.

“Purple Pennsylvania” has peculiar politics.

In 2022 a constitutional amendment to restrict the Governor’s power to declare emergencies passed 55%-45%; but this past fall decennial judicial retention elections (which could have ousted the appellate [in]justices who had supported Governor Wolf’s COVID restrictions) not only failed to accomplish that mission; they failed in “deep red counties” and even within red precinct in those deep red counties.

If Pennsylvania weren’t a Commonwealth I’d call it a State of confusion.

>> “God is the author of life, and in that vein, we cannot put God in a silo and pretend that we can ignore basic morality by claiming separation of church and state or saying that we are just representing our constituencies.” AMEN, sister!

YES and AMEN! Now, if every Bible-believing Christian would GET OFF THEIR BUTT AND VOTE, this Christian nation could HAVE the God-fearing government its founders envisioned. And many DO vote... but far too many don’t bother. The Church has in large part failed to promote Godly government from the pulpit, fearing it’ll reduce the numbers sitting in the pews — shameful!

If filthy democrat women (yes, the women that engage in infanticide are almost always rat voters) want to abort their baby (up to the day of birth) then they should pay the cost entirely. No way should Pennsylvania taxpayers be subsidizing rat abortions. Let the democrat party members pay for it. /spit

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