A coalition of reproductive rights groups joined DC Mayor Vince Gray (D) and DC Delegate Elanor Holmes Norton (D) at a press conference on Tuesday to push for budget autonomy for the nation’s capital city. Until the District of Columbia has the power to control its own budget, they say that DC’s women will continue to be burdened with abortion restrictions imposed by Republicans who don’t actually represent them in Congress.

Since DC’s budget currently has to be approved by Congress, other legislators can either block the city’s initiatives or force through unrelated riders. Those fights often center on women’s health issues. Last year, an appropriations provision blocked DC from covering low-income women’s abortion care with its Medicaid dollars.

At Tuesday’s press conference, women’s health advocates — including representatives from Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Abortion Federation, the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice — pointed out that denying DC the ability to offer Medicaid coverage for abortion ultimately hurts the city’s most vulnerable women. The poverty rate in the nation’s capital is the third worst in the nation, behind Mississippi and Louisiana.

“This policy creates obstacles to care for low-income women, many of whom are women of color, who already face significant barriers to receiving high-quality care,” Susannah Baruch, the interim president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, explained in a statement. “However we feel about abortion, we shouldn’t deny a woman in DC the health coverage she needs just because she’s poor.”

“Politicians don’t belong in a woman’s personal medical decisions just as they don’t belong in DC spending decisions,” Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president, pointed out. The rest of the country agrees with her. According to a 2012 poll, 78 percent of Americans don’t think Congress should be able to impose social policy riders on DC’s budget that interfere with the city’s local affairs.

Nevertheless, congressmembers haven’t taken kindly to the idea of home-rule in DC. Last month, a Florida Republican dismissed DC’s push for budget autonomy as an act of teenage rebellion. “Well, when my kids were young teenagers, they always wanted budget autonomy too,” Rep. Rep. John Mica (R-FL) said.

DC voters passed a budget autonomy referendum in a special election last month. As long as congressmembers like Mica don’t step in to intervene, it will become law on July 10th.

Not content with attempting to impose his anti-abortion agenda upon the women who live in the nation’s capital, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) now intends to push for a nationwide bill to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. Franks, who invoked the illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell to justify his decision to re-introduce a 20-week abortion ban in DC, now says that Gosnell’s crimes have compelled him to amend his bill so it applies to women across the country.

The Arizona congressmember announced his decision to expand his bill on Friday. In a statement, Franks compared Gosnell — who has been convicted of killing of three infants that were born alive following botched illegal, unsanitary abortion procedures — to all late-term abortion procedures. “Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said.

However, that’s a gross mischaracterization of the state of legal abortion services throughout the country. Abortion opponents have repeatedly attempted to twist the facts surrounding Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial to make it appear as if his crimes are rampant throughout legal abortion clinics. But that’s simply not the case. The Philadelphia-area abortion doctor was guilty of much more than simply breaking Pennsylvania’s law that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy; he was also able to offer discounted prices for his services because he didn’t employ medical professionals or adhere to safety standards. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” isn’t analogous to the way that legal, sanitary late-term abortion clinics provide care to the women who need it.

Furthermore, it’s misleading to pretend that Franks’ quest to cut off legal abortion care at just 20 weeks represents a push to ban late-term abortions. In fact, 20-week abortion bans are a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee of legal abortion rights until the point of viability, which is generally accepted to occur around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That’s why, after a handful of states recently enacted 20-week bans, several of them landed in court.

DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fought against Franks’ 20-week abortion ban every time he’s proposed it. She maintains that imposing abortion bans on the District of Columbia is a “stealth way” for abortion opponents to discreetly challenge Roe, since DC doesn’t have any representation in Congress. Now that the bill will apply to the rest of the nation, she remains committed to working to defeat it. “With the help of women nationwide, we defeated the D.C. abortion ban bill on the House floor last Congress. Now that the Franks bill will expressly target all U.S. women, we can expect an even stronger national response to this attack on women’s health,” Holmes Norton said in a statement.

Ironically, pushing to restrict women’s access to abortion isn’t actually an effective policy solution to prevent future Kermit Gosnells. If Franks and his anti-choice colleagues wanted to ensure that desperate women in other states don’t have to resort to illegal providers like Gosnell, they should actually be working to make abortion services more affordable and accessible to low-income women.

Lawmakers often take advantage of the fact that the residents of the nation’s capital don’t have any representation in Congress in order to turn DC into their legislative playground. This session is no exception, as Republicans in both chambers of Congress have taken steps to restrict abortion access for the DC women who aren’t actually their own constituents.

Last week, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks (R) reintroduced a bill to criminalize abortion services in DC after 20 weeks of pregnancy, the exact same measure that failed to advance when Franks pushed it last year. And now, Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) has introduced a companion bill in the Senate. Like Franks, Lee is no stranger to this type of abortion ban. Earlier this year, he tried to accomplish the same goal by offering a budget amendment to restrict DC women’s abortion access.

20-week bans are based on the scientifically dubious claim that fetuses can feel pain after that point — and they’re a top priority for anti-choice activists, who are intent on leveraging the emotional outrage surrounding incredibly late-term abortions to narrow the window for legal abortion services. In reality, however, late-term abortions are already very rare, representing less than one percent of all abortion services across the country. Criminalizing them ends up disproportionately hurting women in two categories: the low-income women who are forced to delay abortion while they save up the money to pay for it, and the women who discover serious fetal abnormalities later in their pregnancies.

Lee’s anti-abortion agenda is keeping him particularly busy lately. He’s also using Kermit Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial as an excuse to spearhead a Senate resolution to encourage more abortion clinic restrictions across the country.

Republican Rep. Trent Franks (AZ) has reintroduced a measure to criminalize abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks of pregnancy, based on the junk science that fetuses can feel pain after that point. The Arizona lawmaker has been particularly focused on legislating DC women’s reproductive rights, despite the fact that he does not actually represent them in Congress. He pushed the same legislation last year, although it ended up failing to advance.

Banning late-term abortion services is a popular anti-choice tactic that is currently advancing in states across the country. It’s a successful strategy partly because abortion opponents can exploit gruesome cases — such as the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion doctor who is accused of performing horrific, illegal late-term abortion services for vulnerable women — to play on Americans’ emotions. That’s exactly what Franks is doing this time around. He claims that forcing a 20-week ban on the nation’s capital city will help keep attention on the Gosnell case.

Abortion opponents claim that late-term abortions prove that abortion procedures are always violent and immoral. In reality, however, these type of much later abortions are incredibly rare, and the women who seek them out are typically in desperate circumstances. Women who may need an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy tend to fall into one of two categories: the economically disadvantaged women who need to delay abortion until they can save up the money for it, and the women who discover serious fetal health issues only after their pregnancy has advanced. 20-week abortion bans don’t actually help put an end to the types of illegal procedures that Gosnell performed; in fact, they simply serve to cut off reproductive health options for these kinds of vulnerable women.

Nonetheless, because the women who live in the District of Columbia don’t have any representation in Congress, their reproductive rights are often left to the whim of Republican lawmakers whom they didn’t actually elect. In addition to Franks, other Republicans often attempt to use DC’s budget negotiations — which currently have to be approved by Congress, since DC doesn’t have the autonomy to appropriate its own funds — to attach anti-abortion riders. Congress has repeatedly prevented DC from using its Medicaid funding from covering low-income women’s abortion services.

Last week, DC held a special election that included a referendum for local budget autonomy, which would prevent Congress from banning its Medicaid coverage of abortion in the future. Unfortunately, budget autonomy won’t prevent lawmakers like Franks from pushing for other types of abortion bans for the District’s residents.