The Vermont House passed a landmark bill Thursday to enshrine abortion rights into state law, rejecting another flurry of last-minute efforts by Republicans to restrict or limit access to the procedure.
By a vote of 106 to 37, the House passed H.57 after six proposed amendments failed. Many of them were similar to measures that either were shot down Wednesday or had been previously rejected by House committees.
“This legislation secures Vermonters’ rights,” Rep. Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) said. “I trust women, and that’s why I’m voting yes.”In explaining his opposition, Rep. Brian Smith (R-Derby) noted that 12-year-old girls need parental permission to get a flu shot. “We’re about to give 12-year-olds the right to get an abortion, and I don’t think that’s right,” Smith said.
The measure goes next to the Senate, where it will be subject to another series of public hearings and legislative debate. Supporters of H.57 say that abortion rights must be protected by law, given the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1972 decision that established abortion rights.
Rep. Anne Donahue (R-Northfield) proposed an amendment that would have required parental notification before minors can receive an abortion. The House voted down that and most of the other proposed amendments.
A similar effort to require that minors get parental consent failed Wednesday. Donahue said she wasn’t trying to restrict a woman’s right to an abortion, but she had a “real concern about protection of our minors.”
“This is not about limiting access. This is about protecting children,” Donahue said.
She noted the legislature has previously passed laws that treat minors differently than adults, such as age requirements for gun purchases.
In rebuttal, Rep. Ann Pugh (D-South Burlington) noted that the House Committee on Human Services had voted 10-1 against a measure involving notification of a minor’s parents. She argued that confidentially is vital to ensuring adolescent access to medical care.
An unborn child “is not like a person walking down the street,” she noted, nor were legislators “talking about a cluster of cancer cells.”
Not every amendment made it to a debate in the House.
In some cases, proposed amendments were rejected as not relevant to the underlying bill. That’s what happened when Rep. Robert Bancroft (R-Westford) proposed language prohibiting the sale of post-abortion fetal tissue.
Rep. John Bartholomew (D-Hartland) argued the amendment
was a separate issue, and Johnson, after consulting with legislative leaders,
agreed.
Bancroft later decried the bill as little more than a “platform for political grandstanding.”
Another failed amendment would have allowed unrestricted access to abortions up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy, but after that only if the fetus was not viable or to protect the mother’s health. Another would have required counseling before minors could receive an abortion.
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It is official. The Vermont Democrat Party now holds the dubious distinction of being the party of unlimited, unrestricted and unregulated abortion-on-demand throughout pregnancy. Common sense amendments to protect minor girls, to limit abortions on unborn babies in the later stages of development, to provide informed consent (including alternatives to abortion), to providing regulation and inspection of abortion clinics, and other amendments, all went down to defeat by a Democrat-led, super-majority in the House.
Pro-abortion Democrat legislators walked in lock step with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU as they read on the House floor the talking points that were rather obviously provided to them by both pro-abortion organizations.
This is the Vermont I know and love, thank you legislators for protecting women from extremist Christians and those who would impose their religious values on me. I won’t keep them from genuflecting to their statues and monuments or talking to an invisible old white man in the sky, and they can keep their sanctimonious claws out of my body and my doctor’s ability to care for me.
Pass one law restricting men’s bodies or medical care, then those who’ve spent their lives trying to restrict women’s medical care might gain some moral authority. Religious zealots have caused pain, misery, and death for thousands of years, with no end in sight. When they involve themselves in our government they need to start contributing and pay taxes. Nonprofit or religious exemptions need to be more restrictive, I’m politically active and I’m not alone in voting for legislators who agree these exemptions are too broad.
No death penalty for crimes against the innocent, but murder for the helpless and innocent. The left has lost their minds. I can only see one bright side to this, ” maybe if the left aborts enough, their will be no more socialist like Bernie.” I will pray for the lost lives this bill will allow.
The fact that a fetus is human has nothing to do with religious belief. Each of us were a fetus at one time. Each of us could be expected to protect that from where we came. Wanted or unwanted. Viable or not viable. In the womb or out of the womb. In all cases human and distinct. Nothing religious there. Science any way you slice it.
This bill ignores the humanity involved focusing on the strong human in control. There is no consideration of balance in the choice made. The bill states it is a right to destroy a preborn human for any reason, and further to discourage any other option to allow that human life…a potential innovator, curer of disease, or just a regular Joe,,,you or I!
The party of slavery and Jim Crow is really living down to the lowest impulses of us all. They are actually proud of the number of children that they’ve killed over the years, and want to kill even more. They plan to replace those children with uneducated illegal aliens who will vote to keep the Democrats in power perpetually, regardless of the fact that they are changing the country from a Constitutional Republic to another broken socialist state like Venezuela.
So is it still Cool-day-La to harvest and sell fetal parts and pieces from aborted fetuses as long as you ‘just break-even’ doing it?
A person is a person from the moment of conception. But a person is still a person no matter what they may do in this life, good or bad. And if you want to debate the rights of a person, why do you limit that fight to protecting the right to life of a person before they are born but care so little about the well being of the person after birth? In case you are having difficulty grasping my meaningwhy arent you maintaining a consistent ethic of life?