Over the past week, the Senate has been consumed by an abortion fight that has turned S. 178, the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA), into a partisan battlefield that has nothing to do with ending modern slavery. For the entire time I worked in Congress from 1999 to 2009, the Hyde Amendment and other provisions related to abortion were not part of the debate to end human trafficking. This may have been because these issues were litigated elsewhere. But I believe that, as the effort to increase attention and develop responses to the horrible abuses involved in human trafficking took shape and gained strength, all actors in the public space understood that this divisive issue should be excluded from the discourse.
{mosads}Regrettably, this consensus has begun to fray. Back in 2012, this issue did emerge in the context of federal grants for services for victims of human trafficking. For a while, members of Congress and advocates who were concerned by this turn of events took steps that endangered the then-pending Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). Yet at the end of the day, Congress found a way to move forward with the TVPRA of 2013, which was passed as part of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act.
Congress needs to heed the lesson of that time, and find a bipartisan solution to the current impasse over the JVTA. The JVTA, while not the panacea for all victims, will, for example, provide new potential funding streams for victims’ services and will provide a platform for survivors to be heard within the U.S. government. But what is really at stake is the historical separation of divisive politics from the bipartisan issue of ending modern slavery. A letter from 90 anti-trafficking organizations calls on Congress to do just that and work in a bipartisan fashion to move this bill forward.
I find it curious that after two years of work on this legislation — and the slow coalescence of a wide range of trafficking groups toward support for it — it is only in the last few months that this issue crept into the debate. The House passed two versions of the JVTA without the Hyde Amendment that is proving so divisive, and the Senate Judiciary Committee reported out at least one version of the bill without it. I think the approach taken by these bills, with some friendly, non-controversial changes that brought additional anti-trafficking groups on board, could be the right approach to solving the current impasse.
We can all dwell on what went wrong to get us to this point, but I believe we need to move past this debate and look forward. Absent a bipartisan solution, the risk is that the politics of abortion will seep more deeply into the human trafficking issue, leading to stalemate not only now, but into the future. Survivors will not be helped by such a turn of events. Only the perpetrators will smirk at the inability of U.S. government to overcome its differences and leave them better able to exploit the innocent.
Abramowitz is vice president for policy and government relations at Humanity United, a U.S.-based foundation dedicated to building peace and advancing human freedom.