WASHINGTON — Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is one of two cosponsors of a controversial bill banning abortion nationwide after 15 weeks.
After Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, introduced the legislation Tuesday, it immediately enflamed the ongoing debate on abortion, an issue Democrats seized after the Supreme Court overturned the protections provided in Roe v. Wade.
Some other Republicans even declined to embrace Graham's proposal.
The bill, which has little chance of becoming law in the Democratic-controlled Congress, would ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy except in cases of rape, incest or risk to the physical health of the mother. State laws that further restrict abortion would be allowed to stay on the books, according to The Associated Press.
"I’ve always been pro-life," Rubio told reporters at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, according to a tweet by his Senate spokesman Dan Holler. "Democrats won’t vote for any restriction of any kind on abortion."
U.S. Rep. Val Demings, a Democrat from Orlando who's looking to unseat Rubio in November, tweeted a statement slamming the senator for trying to "strip women of our constitutional rights."
Last week, she released a TV ad attacking Rubio's position on abortion: "Well, I know something about fighting crime, Senator Rubio. Rape is a crime. Incest is a crime. Abortion is not." The federal proposal has exemptions; Demings said the bill was just the "next step" to a total ban, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
Rubio fired back at his challenger: "Restricting abortions to the first 4 months is more lenient than virtually every country in Europe. The extremists are people like Congresswoman Val Demings who opposes any restrictions & has voted for taxpayer-funded abortion for any reason, at any time, up to the moment of birth."
Florida's new abortion law prohibits the procedure after 15 weeks, with exceptions if the procedure is necessary to save a mother’s life or the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking.
The law is considered to be the strictest abortion ban in state history.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said most GOP senators prefer having the issue of abortion dealt with by the states rather than at the federal level, the AP reported.
In late August, when asked whether he would support a federal ban on abortion, Rubio told CBS Miami, in part, "...This issue is appropriately before the states. That's where it should have always been, that's where it is now and I think that's where it will be for the foreseeable future."