WASHINGTON — Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, is known on Capitol Hill as a nurse, a pastor, a Black Lives Matter activist and a member of a "squad" of progressive women lawmakers. On Thursday, she told a House panel that she is also a rape survivor who had an abortion after she was attacked on a church trip when she was 17. Ms. Bush said she is no longer ashamed. "In the summer of 1994," she declared, "I was raped, I became pregnant and I chose to have an abortion." With the right to abortion under threat after a major Supreme Court setback, Ms. Bush was one of three Democratic congresswomen who sat at a witness table to share their personal experiences with terminating a pregnancy. The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform reflected a sharp cultural divide, with Republicans accusing Democrats of "glorifying and normalizing" abortion, and Democrats making their point — that abortion is a decision best left to women and their doctors — in matter-of-fact terms. Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, got an abortion when she was a young mother caring for a very sick child and struggling to recover from postpartum depression so severe that she considered suicide. Her doctor told her that carrying a second child to term would be extremely risky for both her and the baby. "I very much wanted to have more children," she told the panel, "but I simply could not imagine going through that again." Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, was the first Black cheerleader in her high school and a promising student with good grades when she got pregnant before abortion was legal in the United States. Her mother sent her to a friend in Texas, who took her for a "back alley" abortion at a clinic in Mexico. "A lot of girls and women in my generation didn't make it — they died from unsafe abortions," she said. But Representative Kat Cammack, a freshman from Florida and the lone Republican member of Congress to testify, offered a starkly different personal story, telling her colleagues that she "would not be here" if her mother, who suffered a stroke after having her first child, had not rebuffed a doctor's advice to have an abortion. "You can imagine the feeling, the disappointment, the struggle, the internal anguish that my mother felt," Ms.Cammack said, adding, "She chose life. That wasn't an easy decision for a single mom."