A Philly lawmaker refused to advance her colleague’s reproductive healthcare legislation. Now she’s promoting her own.
City Councilmember Kendra Brooks and her allies are incensed that Councilmember Nina Ahmad iced them out of an effort to hold a hearing on access to reproductive healthcare in the city.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Kendra Brooks isn’t taking kindly to a recent gesture of duplication by one of her colleagues.
The progressive City Council member is incensed at Councilmember Nina Ahmad, a Democrat who has been in something of cold war with Brooks for months over stalled legislation related to reproductive healthcare access.
It all came to a head Thursday when Ahmad introduced a resolution to hold a hearing examining access to such care in Philadelphia — legislation that would, under most circumstances, be uncontroversial in a body where Democrats hold a supermajority.
But Brooks and Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, both of the progressive Working Families Party, voted against it — a highly unusual move in a body that almost always unanimously approves legislation to authorize hearings.
The backstory: Brooks had already authored legislation to hold a hearing on threats to reproductive healthcare, and City Council approved it five months ago.
But the hearings have not happened. Ahmad, who chairs the Public Health and Human Services Committee, has refused to schedule Brooks’ hearing, citing scheduling difficulties. That was despite pleas from advocates to move swiftly amid new federal restrictions on reproductive care and clinics closing due to funding loss.
Now, Ahmad is poised to call up her own legislation on the matter, leaving Brooks and her allies feeling squeezed out.
Ahmad said her legislation is far more broad than Brooks’ and would allow Council to examine the entire reproductive healthcare landscape, not just access to abortion care.
The Council member who authors a resolution to hold a hearing typically has sway over how the hearing is conducted, including steering the tenor of it by lining up witnesses to testify. In turn, that can drive the creation of more concrete legislation.
“You have to be comprehensive,” Ahmad said in an interview. “I’m evidence-based. I’m a scientist. I want to look at the whole breadth of things.”
But Brooks said she is focused on all forms of reproductive healthcare and criticized Ahmad’s legislation for failing to acknowledge the role of the city’s Reproductive Freedom Task Force, which Brooks leads. Members of that group called for Council hearings after local Planned Parenthood leaders said they were disappointed that the most recent city budget did not include a $500,000 line item for sexual and reproductive healthcare, as it did the previous year.
Brooks said Ahmad was engaging in “foolishness.”
“This is a level of petty that turns people off from politics,” she said. “It’s really unfortunate that she would play politics on an issue that’s this important.”
And Brooks intimated that the saga could cause her and her progressive allies to target Ahmad next year, when every City Council member is up for reelection.
“I’m not going to forget this,” Brooks said. “We’re very close to reelection to be playing this game.”
The veiled threat from Brooks, the face of the city’s Working Families Party, is notable and could put the WFP on a collision course with the local Democratic Party — which tends to endorse incumbents such as Ahmad. The WFP has previously said its efforts to win minority-party seats on Council are no threat to Democrats.
However, in 2023 when both Brooks and Ahmad were running for seats on Council to represent the city at-large, Ahmad said that the WFP was trying to “poach” Democratic voters and that its political strategy was “lazy.”
But Ahmad said Thursday she is not playing politics.
“She’s the one,” Ahmad said of Brooks. “I’m the chair of the Public Health Committee, and I need to be aware of what work is going on in these respects. And if people don’t want to share, that’s up to them.”
Brooks said she plans to hold her own hearing in March — what she is calling a “people’s hearing” that will take place outside the walls of City Hall.
Some advocates say they will participate in both that event and Ahmad’s traditional hearing.
Signe Espinoza, the vice president of public policy and advocacy at Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, said she is supportive of any legislation that elevates the issue — no matter the author.
“We are committed to keeping the doors open, and we also recognize that this is the most hostile environment we’ve ever been in,” Espinoza said, noting that clinics have closed across the country. “The clock is ticking.”