If, as expected, Minnesota Democratic governor signs a bill just passed by the Minnesota Senate, the state will permit a right to abortion at any time of a woman’s pregnancy.
“Every individual who becomes pregnant has a fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth, or obtain an abortion, and to make autonomous decisions about how to exercise this fundamental right,” the bill, known as the Protect Reproductive Options Act, states. Every Democrat voted for the bill; every Republican opposed it. Walz has stated he will sign the bill into law.
Late term-abortions are often performed by using gruesome procedures that can include crushing or dismembering the baby before it is removed from the mother’s body, or in some cases, injecting a lethal drug in to the baby’s heart.
“Minnesotans don’t support elective third-trimester abortion. They just don’t. But that’s what this extreme bill entrenches in our state law: the right to abort any baby for any reason at any time up to birth,” Cathy Blaeser, the executive director for Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) said. “Under this bill, even babies who are old enough to live outside the womb and to feel excruciating pain have no protection from lethal violence. The extremism of H.F. 1 puts Minnesota in the same category as just a handful of countries around the world, including North Korea and China.”
“The lack of parental involvement allows the most heinous of criminals—human and sex traffickers—to hide behind the doors of the unlicensed, uninspected abortion facility,” she continued. “These traffickers are happily watching this legislature advance extreme, unfettered abortion bills that enable them to continue to traffic their victims.”
“We have a duty to answer the call of Minnesotans to truly protect those reproductive freedoms, to enshrine them not simply in case law, but in our statutory law,” stated the bill’s author, state senator Sen. Jennifer McEwen, as MPR reported. “These are our values, this is the practice in Minnesota. This is what we believe.”
But GOP Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson countered, “Today we are not just codifying Roe v. Wade or Doe v. Gomez as the author has indicated. We are enacting the most extreme bill in the country regarding youth sterilization, late term abortions and public viability for a vast array of new reproductive rights.”
Republicans tried to amend the bill 35 times and failed each time, Fox News noted.