Washington: The House of Representatives on Friday voted to pass a sweeping abortion package that would ensure access to the procedure in all 50 states, invalidating state-based restrictions and conscience protections intended to protect medical personnel from being coerced into performing or abetting the killing of unborn children.

One of the bills in the package, the Women’s Health Protection Act, passed the House 219-to-210, with all Republicans and one Democratic member, Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, a Catholic opposing it. Another bill, the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act, which would secure the right of women to cross state lines to obtain an abortion, passed the House 223-to-205.

The votes were largely symbolic taken with an eye toward pivotal mid-term elections in November. With Democrats in the Senate currently 10 votes short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, neither pro-abortion measure approved Friday is likely to gain final passage into law.

“We must ensure that the American people remember in November because with two more Democratic senators, we will be able to eliminate the filibuster when it comes to a woman’s right to choose and to make reproductive freedom the law of the land,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

Friday’s moves marked the first time Congress has voted on major abortion legislation since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision on June 24.

Roe established abortion as a constitutionally protected right and effectively barred states from banning or severely restricting abortion for nearly 50 years.

The court’s 5-4 decision last month in the Mississippi abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization dismantled that federalized legal abortion framework, freeing states to regulate abortion as they see fit.

Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden and Pelosi, both Catholics, have vowed to negate the Dobbs decision’s impact by “codifying” or enshrining Roe’s provisions into federal law through passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act.

But opponents of the bill say it goes even further than Roe in outlawing state parental notification laws and other regulations that Roe allowed.

Ahead of Friday’s vote, the national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America released new national polling it says shows that 70% of voters oppose abortion without restrictions, including majorities of both pro-choice and pro-life voters. Sixty-three percent of voters disapprove of legislation that would overturn nearly all state-level prohibitions on abortion, even limits on late-term abortion, the group said.

A new EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll released Thursday shows that a large majority of Catholic voters (82%) support some kind of restriction on abortion. Also, a majority of Catholic voters say they are less likely to back a political candidate who supports abortion at any time during pregnancy.

“Pro-abortion Democrats are dramatically out of touch with a majority of Americans who reject abortion extremism,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement Friday.

“Already in this new Dobbs era, more than a dozen states have implemented life-saving protections for unborn children and their mothers. Yet Democrats and the abortion industry are spreading fear and lies about the Dobbs decision to push their unpopular, unsafe agenda — including the deceptively named Women’s Health Protection Act.”

Chelsey Youman, the national legislative advisor for the pro-life Human Coalition Action, said the act would make aborting a child legal up until death for any reason.

“As states finally have the ability to protect all preborn lives, a narrow House majority now wants to impose abortion-on-demand on the entire country,” Youman said in a statement.

“It would force Americans to pay for abortions with their tax dollars,” she cautioned. “It would violate the conscience rights of some health care professionals by forcing them to perform abortions against their deepest-held beliefs.”

The legislation, she said, would make the U.S. stand out in its support of abortion.

“Furthermore, it would place the United States among the countries in the world with the most liberal abortion laws. Only seven countries allow elective abortions after 20 weeks — and this list includes the notorious human rights violators North Korea and China.”