The North Carolina Senate voted Tuesday to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill banning most abortions after 12 weeks’ gestation, sending the hotly debated measure to the House.
 
The Senate voted 30-20 along party lines to overturn the veto of Senate Bill 20, meeting the necessary three-fifths threshold without a vote to spare. The House is scheduled to take up the measure at about 8 p.m. ET.
 
No Senate Republican flipped despite intense pressure from pro-choice advocates and the Democrat governor, who toured the state last week to drum up opposition to the measure before vetoing it at a Saturday rally in Raleigh.
 
Republicans hold supermajorities of exactly three-fifths in both chambers, meaning that only one House or Senate Republican would be needed to defeat the override. The split in the House is 72 Republicans and 48 Democrats.
 
The bill, passed earlier this month, lowers the gestational limit for most abortions from 20 weeks to 12 weeks. The cut-off for rape and incest would run through 20 weeks’ gestation and through 24 weeks for serious fetal abnormalities.
 
Polls show a majority of Americans support limiting most abortions to the first trimester, which is about 13 weeks’ gestation, but Democrats condemned the bill as a threat to the health of women and girls as well as the state’s medical community.
 
“This bill is a slap in the face. It is a muzzle over our mouths, and it is a straitjacket on our bodies,” said Democrat state Sen. Natasha Marcus on the Senate floor. “It is honestly hard for me to believe that my government would do this to me, to my daughters, to my friends, to their daughters.”
 
After the vote, some Senate Democrats held up purple signs that said “Politicians Make Crappy Doctors.”

Pro-choice onlookers in the packed gallery waved signs with the message “Bans Off Our Bodies,” while their pro-life counterparts held up “Vote Pro-Life” placards.
 
The abortion issue took center stage in state legislatures this year following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion nationwide.