Advocates, opponents respond to Nixon’s non-stance on abortion legislation
Photo by Rebecca Townsend/Missouri News Horizon
Refusing to either reject or endorse controversial legislation to limit access to late-term abortions, Gov. Jay Nixon said he will allow two bills to become law without his signature.
House Bill 213 and Senate Bill 65, which both passed the general assembly with overwhelming majorities this year, specify that no abortion of a viable, unborn child can be performed or induced after 20 weeks of development except in certain situations where the mother’s physical health is threatened.
The governor did not put his signature to the bill, but by taking no action on the legislation, it will become law automatically next month.
“This legislation was approved by an overwhelming, bi-partisan majority in both houses,” Nixon said in a written statement. “Although people have differing views on this issue, it’s important that we work together to provide accurate health information, promote personal responsibility, protect women’s health and improve foster care, adoption and child protection services.”
Groups on both sides of the issue were disappointed in the governor’s refusal to take a decisive stance.
Pamela Sumners, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri, said that her group would have preferred to see the governor reject the legislation even though it would have all but certainly been overturned by the legislature. She criticized the bills for being medically unfounded while also chastising progressive politicians who fail to stand-up for abortion rights.
“(A) lesson that we really can learn looking back at the 2010 elections is that a number of incumbents who had previously been supported by either our group or an overall progressive coalition took votes that made them be un-endorsable for us and they lost,” she said.
Meanwhile, Missouri Family Policy Council Executive Director Joe Ortwerth, who supported the legislation, said his group was happy to see the policy allowed to pass into law but would have preferred to see the governor officially endorse it.
“We would be very grateful if the governor were to decide to put his signature to these pro-life bills, but at the same time, the important thing to us is that these protective pieces of legislation are actually on the books,” Ortwerth said.
Similar legislation has already been approved in several other states, but opponents say the movement has little basis in the medical reality of late-term abortion procedure.
Sumners said that of the 63 abortions performed after 20-weeks in the state of Missouri last year; virtually all were planned pregnancies that suffered a medical calamity. They were not the kind of elective procedures the new law would ban. The law places an extra, unnecessary burden on doctors, she said. Doctors who perform such procedures will have to get a second opinion from an independent physician before performing an abortion after 20 weeks and file new records with the state, with prison sentences possible for doctors found in violation of the law.
“These are already kind of heartbreaking cases,” Sumner’s said. “They generally involved wanted pregnancies that went very far awry and just now are untenable. So now for the state of Missouri to insert itself in there and play doctor and try to be the third physician in the room is really inexcusable.”
But Ortwerth disagreed with this assessment. He said that the new regulations provided plenty of leeway to terminate pregnancies that pose a physical health threat to the mother – however, abortions will no longer be permitted on the basis of the mother’s mental health.
Ortweth and others argue that a fetus represents an independent life and that it’s not unreasonable to have extra safeguards in the law to prevent its unnecessary destruction of that life.
“What this legislation will do is put an end to elective abortions that are done late in pregnancy,” he said.
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Posted by Tim Sampson on July 15, 2011. Filed under Featured.
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