Pro-life bill battered, Senate does nothing
- Jun 17, 2008 - comment
JEFFERSON CITY—The Missouri General Assembly in the last days of the 2008 session was characterized by the placid demeanor of representatives and senators as bills that may have stood a chance of passing in previous years simply wasted away and died due to lack of interest.
House Bill 1831 would have strengthened Missouri’s informed consent law and made it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion. The bill cleared the House 113-33 back in April but stalled in the Senate as time ran out May 16 on this year’s Legislature. Kerry Messer, lobbyist for the Christian Life Commission (CLC) of the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC), called it “our biggest disappointment of the year.”
State Rep. Bob Onder, R-Lake St. Louis, fought hard to accurately define his bill even as its provisions were being contorted, distorted and ridiculed through various liberal-leaning media outlets. Onder, who is a doctor as well as an attorney, decided to write letters to the editor in which he detailed the bill’s merits.
Onder wrote that the bill would not impose an undue burden on the court-declared right to an abortion but instead would give women the right to obtain specific information before an abortion. It also would make it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion by: committing an already illegal act such as assault, battery, kidnapping, or threatening with a deadly weapon; stalking or perpetrating violence against a woman; threatening to fire a woman from her job unless she has an abortion; or threatening to take away a woman’s scholarship unless she has an aborton.
In conclusion, Onder wrote that “this bill is designed to protect women and ensure they are acting freely and are fully informed should they choose to have an abortion.”
The bill also would have required abortion clinics to provide women with the opportunity to view an active ultrasound of the unborn child and to hear its heatbeat, if it is audible. Planned Parenthood said it already has ultrasound equipment in its clinics, but Messer said those ultrasounds are used to look for the position of baby in order to kill him or her more efficiently.
Meanwhile, provisions of the major pro-life bill of 2007 that was signed into law last July by Gov. Matt Blunt at Concord Baptist Church in Jefferson City continue to be litigated in county and federal courts in the Kansas City area.
Much of the law is already in effect, making Missouri the first state to ban Planned Parenthood from teaching sex education classes in public schools. Planned Parenthood Education and Outreach Coordinator Ellen Baker told The Maneater, the University of Missouri’s student newspaper, that she could only teach students about sexual education in jail, probation meetings or rehab clinics. Dale Schowengerdt is the Alliance Defense Fund attorney retained by the state to represent Missourians free of charge in the lawsuit generated by Planned Parenthood and an abortion doctor.
The 2007 legislation requires abortion clinics that perform second- and third-trimester abortions, or at least five first trimester abortions per month, to be classified as ambulatory surgical centers, according to Baptist Press. A federal judge has delayed enforcement of that portion of the law, with negotiations between Planned Parenthood and state health department officials ongoing. They have twice visited the Columbia abortion clinic, according to the Associated Press.
U.S. District Judge Ortrie Smith of Kansas City has managed to maintain the status quo for the abortion industry in Missouri. His actions have kept the Columbia and Kansas City abortion clinics open by means of a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction.
Blunt issued a press release May 16 that pointed to the approval of $620,000 in this year’s budget for the state’s Alternatives to Abortion program as a pro-life legislative success for 2008. The program was made permanent as part of the major pro-life bill of 2007.
This article is reprinted from the June 3, 2008, issue of The Pathway, the newspaper of the Missouri Baptist Convention.
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