Tag: abortion ban
Republican Party of Wisconsin

Wisconsin GOP Senate Candidates All Support Abortion Ban

The Republican field for the 2024 Wisconsin Senate race remains in flux as several potential candidates mull over whether to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Despite strong support among Wisconsin voters for reproductive rights, each of the likely GOP contenders has a history of opposing legal abortion or actively working for an abortion ban.

In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans expected a “red wave” would net them a pickup of at least two Democratic-held U.S. Senate seats and a GOP majority in the chamber. Instead, every single GOP challenger lost, and Democrats ended up gaining an open Republican-held seat in Pennsylvania.

Many analysts have attributed the lack of predicted Republican victories to voters’ anger over the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the nearly 50-year-old guarantee of reproductive rights established in Roe v. Wade. Republicans nominated abortion rights opponents in targeted Senate races across the country in 2022, and they all lost to Democratic backers of reproductive freedom.

As the 2024 elections approach, Senate Republicans seem poised to repeat the same failed approach.

On June 17, the WisPolitics political news site held a straw poll at the convention of the Republican Party of Wisconsin in La Crosse. Six possible Republican Senate candidates received support: former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke; real estate developer and 2012 Senate candidate Eric Hovde; staffing firm executive Scott Mayer; former College Democrats of America president turned 2018 GOP Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson; former state Senate President Roger Roth; and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany.

Clarke has repeatedly backed state and federal abortion bans. After House Democrats passed a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons in July 2022, he tweeted: “Oh bag it Democrats. They claim gun control will save lives. SO WILL A BAN ON ABORTION. That kills more lives than guns do.”

A month earlier, Clarke compared abortion rights to slavery, tweeting: “These same devils would have called reversing Plessey v Ferguson [sic] and Dred Scott decision was a step backward. WRONG. It righted a wrong by the US Supreme Court just like reversing Roe v Wade has done. Killing babies is as immoral a wrong as slavery.”

According to the progressive website Blogging Blue, Hovde said at a July 2012 campaign event, “I’m 100% pro-life,” and added that he only would make an exception in cases of rape and incest. In campaign radio ads that year, he noted an endorsement from the anti-abortion rights group Wisconsin Right to Life and said: “I believe that we’re all created in God’s image. Defending innocent human life is a basic responsibility of civilized people.”

Wisconsin Right to Life said in its June 2012 endorsement, “Eric Hovde has indicated strong support for federal right-to-life issues should he be elected.”

“I am absolutely unapologetically pro-life, I really am,” Mayer told USA Today in May, “ but we have to have some access.” In April, he told NBC News that he was “absolutely pro-life” and would likely allow the procedure only in the first three months, except in cases of rape, incest, or health risk.

Though Nicholson said in a 2000 address at the Democratic National Convention that Democrats “care about a woman’s right to choose,” he has since abandoned his support for reproductive rights. During his unsuccessful 2018 bid for the Senate, he said he would back an abortion ban but would consider exceptions “case by case” as long as the legislation “saves the unborn and does it in a way that’s enforceable.” In an aborted 2022 gubernatorial campaign, Nicholson promised to “protect innocent life” by providing state funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

During Roth’s unsuccessful 2022 campaign for lieutenant governor, his biography on his campaign website said, “Despite radical moves from liberals to push partial-birth abortion, abortion on demand, or murdering a child based on their sex, Roger has stood to thwart the left’s ruthless ambition to end the life of thousands of future Wisconsinites.”

Roth sponsored a 2015 bill in the Wisconsin Senate to prohibit “abortion of an unborn child considered capable of experiencing pain.” Abortion rights opponents have falsely claimed that fetuses can feel pain as early as 15 weeks into a pregnancy, though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says on its website, “The science conclusively establishes that a human fetus does not have the capacity to experience pain until after at least 24–25 weeks.”

Tiffany received “A+” ratings from the anti-abortion rights group SBA Pro-Life America for the past two Congresses, indicating consistent agreement with its positions. He is currently a co-sponsor of a bill that would ban abortions nationally after a “fetal heartbeat is detectable.” Abortion opponents falsely claim that there is a heartbeat at six weeks into a pregnancy, while the science shows that there is no cardiac structure in a fetus at that age.

“All of the potential GOP candidates for Senate want to help Mitch McConnell and MAGA Republicans pass a national abortion ban and keep abortion illegal in Wisconsin,” Arik Wolk, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told the American Independent Foundation. “That’s out of touch with Wisconsin values and dangerous for our state and our country.”

According to the report “Abortion Attitudes in a Post-Roe World: Findings From the 50-State 2022 American Values Atlas,” produced by the nonprofit research organization PRRI, 64 percent of Wisconsin residents believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

A June 2023 survey by the polling firm GQR of voters in Wisconsin and six other Senate battleground states, commissioned by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, found that 65 percent support abortion being legal in all or most circumstances.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Judge Issues Injunction Blocking Florida's 15-Week Abortion Ban

Judge Issues Injunction Blocking Florida's 15-Week Abortion Ban

Judge John Cooper of the Florida Second Circuit Court in Leon County on Thursday issued a temporary injunction blocking a Florida law, scheduled to take effect on July 1, that would ban abortions at 15 weeks' gestation. The injunction, which takes effect as soon as the judge signs it, was issued in response to a lawsuit filed against state officials by a coalition of reproductive rights groups to block the law.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 5, known as "Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality," in April. Abortion is currently legal in Florida up to 24 weeks' gestation.

The Florida Constitution guarantees individuals the right to privacy, and the plaintiffs in the suit, which include two state Planned Parenthood affiliates and a number of women's health clinics, based their challenge to H.B. 5 on that constitutional guarantee, saying in their complaint, "The Act, on its face or, in the alternative, as applied, violates the right to privacy of women seeking and obtaining abortions in the state of Florida, as guaranteed by article I, section 23 of the Florida Constitution."

In announcing his decision, Cooper said: "Florida passed into its Constitution an explicit right of privacy that is not contained in the U.S. Constitution. The Florida Supreme Court has determined, in its words, 'Florida's privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman's decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy.'"


The decision is expected to be appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, whose seven justices were appointed by Republican governors, three by DeSantis.

Planned Parenthood noted in a statement posted on June 1: "HB 5 will force Floridians to remain pregnant against their will, violating their dignity and bodily autonomy, and endangering their families, their health, and even their lives. The impacts of pushing reproductive health care out of reach in the middle of a maternal mortality crisis will fall hardest on Black women, who are nearly three times more likely than white women to die during childbirth, or shortly after."

On June 24, DeSantis tweeted his support for the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that day in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that struck down the constitutional right to abortion nationwide affirmed in Roe v. Wade: "By properly interpreting the Constitution, the Supreme Court has answered the prayers of millions upon millions of Americans. ... Florida will continue to defend its recently-enacted pro-life reforms against state court challenges, will work to expand pro-life protections, and will stand for life by promoting adoption, foster care and child welfare."

State Republican lawmakers have already introduced anti-abortion bills, and in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, such bills could find more success. The "Florida Heartbeat Act," introduced by state Rep. Webster Barnaby last year, would have required physicians to test for what it misleadingly and incorrectly calls a "fetal heartbeat" before performing abortions and would have relied on "private civil enforcement" to implement it, encouraging a type of vigilantism also found in Texas' S.B. 8, which bans abortion at six weeks' gestation.

As gynecologist and obstetrician Jennifer Kerns told NPR for a story republished in May, "What we're really detecting [on an ultrasound] is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart."

The Guttmacher Institute, the reproductive rights research and policy organization, designates Florida as "restrictive" with regard to abortion access in its mapping of the states post-Roe, putting it in the third-most restrictive category out of seven.

The court heard oral arguments in the case on Monday and Thursday. The New York Times reported that one of the plaintiffs, Dr. Shelly Hsiao-Ying Tien of Jacksonville, said in her testimony, "Women and girls who need abortions after 15 weeks tend to have the most challenging and compelling life circumstances," including poverty, domestic violence, and medical complications.

Restrictions on abortion in Florida affect people outside the state as well. As Politico reported on June 24, women in Georgia and Alabama, where abortion policies are more restrictive, have for many years traveled to Florida to obtain the procedure. Last year, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, 4,873 women came to the state for abortion services.

Nikki Fried, Florida's commissioner of agriculture, is running in the crowded Democratic primary to replace DeSantis as governor in November. In an interview on Fox News on June 25, Fried blasted the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs: "This is something that every single member of our Legislature and every single governor across the country needs to know that the people did not want this. Over 67% of my own state did not want a change in Roe v. Wade. And so the governor or any other Legislature continues to erode this right to privacy and this over-intrusion of government, then they're going to be voted out in November."

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist held a press conference before the ruling on Thursday morning during which he vowed to aggressively pursue reproductive rights for Floridians: "I won't stop until we win the war and we have a pro-choice governor back in Tallahassee."

In a statement released by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Kelley Flynn, president and CEO of A Woman's Choice clinics, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said: "While Floridians may soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief, make no mistake, abortion access is in real peril in our state. Already, lawmakers have made it incredibly difficult for our patients to access the essential health care they need and for us to provide that care."

Immediately after Cooper announced his decision, Fried tweeted, "The 15-week abortion ban was just ruled unconstitutional in Florida. Because it is. We won't go back. We will keep fighting."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

McConnell

Senate Republicans Insist They Won't Ban Abortion, Despite McConnell Gaffe

For decades, Republicans have assailed pro-abortion Supreme Court rulings — for instance, 1973’s Roe v. Wade and 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, among others -- but with the end of Roe reportedly imminent, conservative Congressional representatives are quickly dialing back their anti-abortion rhetoric, fearing public reaction could cost them in the midterms.

Despite secretly meeting with leading anti-abortion activists to brainstorm plans for a federal ban on abortions nationwide, GOP lawmakers were quick to dismiss Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s weekend suggestion that the party could soon turn its sights to enacting a total abortion ban.

"I don't think it's really an appropriate topic for Congress to be passing a national law on," said Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), according to CNN.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), a religious rightist, echoed Cornyn, telling Newsweek, "No, I don't support a federal ban on abortion after Roe vs. Wade, if it's overturned in the first instance."

Hawley added, "I think it would be better for states to debate this, allow it to breathe and for Congress to act where there's national consensus."

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the third-ranking Senate Republican, noted that the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggested that states should regulate abortion. "I want to see the states have that opportunity and the authority to do so," Barrasso said when asked for his thoughts on a potential federal abortion ban.

Republicans in Congress are trying to keep focus trained on inflation, crime, and border security, as recent polls show that most Americans oppose national legislation to ban abortion. So they want to talk about almost anything else.

“You need — it seems to me, excuse the lecture — to concentrate on what the news is today,” McConnell himself said last Tuesday. “Not a leaked draft but the fact that the draft was leaked.”

Last week, in an interview with USA Today, McConnell promised that Republicans, if they win back the Senate, won’t scrap the filibuster for a total abortion ban by a simple majority vote.

"If the leaked opinion became the final opinion, legislative bodies — not only at the state level but at the federal level — certainly could legislate in that area," the minority leader told the paper. "And if this were the final decision, that was the point that it should be resolved one way or another in the legislative process. So yeah, it's possible."

However, McConnell dodged questions from CNN on whether he’d bring an abortion bill to the floor of a Republican-controlled Senate.

Democrats immediately decried McConnell’s abortion ban suggestion, and GOP lawmakers, sensing a rapidly spreading wave of public outrage at attempts to overturn abortion rights, have expressed little interest in it or noted that there wouldn’t be enough votes to enact such a ban.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) played down the notion his party would have the votes for a total national abortion ban. "It's about as possible as this vote we will take on Wednesday," Graham told CNN, referring to an upcoming Democratic effort to codify in federal law .

"Let's see what happens. I'm not going to get into what-ifs," Senator Shelley Moore Capito said, declining an opportunity to weigh in on the matter.

Senator John Thune (R-SD) declared his support for an abortion ban with exceptions, but noted that his stand might not be a consensus within his party. "That's my personal position," Thune said. "That's certainly not a caucus position. I don't think we have any idea at this point about any of that."

Despite sudden Republican back-pedaling on abortion, Democrats have signaled their intention to use the looming Supreme Court ruling to ask voters to punish Republicans in November.

Led By Alyssa Milano, Hollywood May Boycott Georgia Over Abortion Ban

Led By Alyssa Milano, Hollywood May Boycott Georgia Over Abortion Ban

Georgia legislators have passed a so-called “heartbeat bill” that would ban abortion beyond six weeks, and Gov. Brian Kemp appears prepared to sign the legislation into law this week.

But doing so might be costly for the state.

The Peach State has long been a go-to location for Hollywood filmmakers, but the abortion ban has stirred opposition among many big names in the entertainment industry. Actor and producer Alyssa Milano collected signatures for a letter pledging to boycott work that would bring them to Georgia if the bill becomes law.

Other groups, including the Writers Guild of America, embraced the boycott sparked by Milano as well. As CBS News reported, other state governors are stepping up to poach the filmmaking business if Georgia triggers the boycott.

Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to Kemp in a contentious and dubious election in which he oversaw the vote as secretary of state, warned about the risks of imposing limits on women’s reproductive rights: