A majority of Republican lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee joined Democrats on Thursday in deciding to table a bill to make abortion “trafficking” inside or outside of Montana’s borders a felony for pregnant patients and those who assist them, if the procedure is deemed illegal.

Eight Republicans voted to set House Bill 609 aside, joining all of the committee’s eight Democrats. Only four Republicans voted against the motion to table.

Another bill restricting medication abortion, House Bill 555, had been tabled by the same committee the previous day. In that case, four Republicans sided with committee Democrats. 

“I think we need to address abortion in a wide variety of means,” said Rep. Tracy Sharp, R-Polson, the lawmaker who moved to table the felony abortion bill. “But some of these bills that we’ve been bringing up here, I just have to admit, I’m really uncomfortable with.”

Sharp cited the November passage of Constitutional Initiative 128, which will broadly enshrine abortion rights protections in the state Constitution beginning this summer, as part of the reason for his vote.

Another Republican lawmaker who voted against the measure, Rep. Braxton Mitchell from Columbia Falls, later told Montana Free Press that he and other lawmakers disagreed with the bill’s penalties for pregnant women.

“We just simply didn’t support the bill,” Mitchell said in a text message Thursday afternoon. “The penalties on the mother were too egregious.”

In a phone interview, the sponsor of HB 609 and HB 555, Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings, said she had requested that both measures be tabled after intense and emotional committee hearings. 

During Wednesday’s proceedings, opponents said HB 609 would target women who had to travel out of state to terminate much-wanted pregnancies because of severe fetal anomalies. Seekins-Crowe said Thursday that that was not the bill’s intent.

“I call it ‘spiked.’ We get spiked by people,” Seekins-Crowe said, arguing that the legislation was meant to prevent abortions for viable pregnancies.

With the impending transmittal deadline for policy bills to move from one chamber to another, Seekins-Crowe said that she decided to table the measures to allow the Legislature to focus on other issues. 

“All of a sudden I found us in that realm, and I didn’t want the process to ever take away from the content,” she said, adding that Republican committee members who opposed the measure’s content had not approached her about their concerns.

During the Wednesday meeting, the committee heard emotional testimony about HB 609 from more than two dozen opponents. By contrast, just two proponents spoke in support of the legislation.

Republican lawmakers asked few questions during the hearing, while Democrats tried to highlight that the measure would make felons out of pregnant women, their spouses and other supportive figures who transport them to appointments, such as domestic violence workers.

Members of the public who spoke against the bill called it “cruel” for targeting women who learn of fetal anomalies and heart-breaking complications later in pregnancy. Other opponents said the bill was “disappointing” after Montanans widely approved a constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion rights protections in November.

“I grew up in a Montana that truly valued freedom and privacy. This does not feel like freedom. This feels like control, oppression and a cruel political agenda not born of true Montana values,” said Hannah Linkenhoker, one of the opponents. “I strongly urge the members of this committee to oppose this horrific bill.”

A representative of the Montana Family Foundation, one of the two supporters that testified in favor of HB 609, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.

During the committee hearing, the group’s legal counsel said that the bill would have fit within the parameters of CI-128. 

The constitutional amendment permits the government to regulate abortion after fetal viability, which it defines as a point when a health care provider determines “there is a significant likelihood of the fetus’s sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.”

Seekins-Crowe said Thursday that the amendment’s language is difficult to interpret and that many of her constituents remain concerned that it will allow for unfettered abortion access. She said that, even though she’d been receiving substantial criticism from abortion rights advocates, she wants the Legislature to keep debating the issue.

“Why can’t I have an opinion? I’m a Montanan. This is what we do,” Seekins-Crowe said. “We have big ideas and big discussions."

Mara Silvers is a reporter for the Montana Free Press, a nonprofit newsroom, and can be reached at msilvers@montanafreepress.org.