Oklahoma senator blocks Democratic bill to protect interstate travel for abortion

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford on Thursday blocked a request from Democratic senators to unanimously pass a bill that would protect interstate travel to obtain an abortion.

Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.) and Patty Murray (Wash.) on Thursday sought unanimous consent to pass the "Freedom to Travel for Health Care Act"  which would have prohibited states with abortion bans from making it illegal for women to travel to another state with fewer restrictions to terminate their pregnancies.

Cortez Masto specifically called out Lankford in a press release for blocking the bill's unanimous passage.

Lankford objected on behalf of all Republican senators and called it an attempt "to inflame, to raise the what ifs," NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur observed.

After the bill failed to pass unanimously, President Joe Biden framed it as a rights issue.

"Immediately after Roe was reversed, I laid out how our Administration would use executive action to protect a woman’s right to travel across state borders to get the care she needs. Today, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would make that right a law," he tweeted.

Lankford argued that no state has banned women from traveling to obtain an abortion and said, "There's a child in this conversation as well." 

Rather than asking whether a woman has a right to travel to terminate a pregnancy, Lankford said Democrats should be asking, "Does the child in the womb have the right to travel in their future?"

In her statement, Cortez Masto said bills in Republican states to prevent interstate travel for abortion are "blatantly unconstitutional."

She argued: "They constrain the fundamental constitutional right to travel. They are anti-woman and anti-business. And merely proposing them has created profound uncertainty for patients, health care providers, insurers, and employers across the country."

Murray wrote after the bill failed: "It should be hard to think of something more extreme, more barbaric, more un-American than ripping away women’s rights and forcing them to travel hundreds of miles to get an abortion. And yet, here Republicans stand, saying no. Saying to American women: 'We don’t just want to control your bodies—we want to control your travel. We want to hold you captive in your state and force you to give birth.' They should be ashamed of themselves."