Story from the ultra-leftist New York Times. (H/T Wes Widner)
Excerpt:
The Oklahoma Legislature voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to override vetoes of two highly restrictive abortion measures, one making it a law that women undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion.
Though other states have passed similar measures forcing women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, requiring a doctor or technician to set up the monitor where the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.
The second measure passed into law Tuesday protects doctors from malpractice suits if they decide not to inform the parents of a unborn baby that the fetus has birth defects. The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion.
Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, vetoed both bills last week. The ultrasound law, he said, was flawed because it did not exempt rape and incest victims and was an unconstitutional intrusion into a woman’s privacy. He painted the other measure as immoral.
“It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform pregnant women in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on a patient,” Mr. Henry said.
The Republican majorities in both houses, however, saw things differently. On Monday, the House voted overwhelmingly to override the vetoes, and the Senate followed suit at 10:42 a.m. Tuesday, making the two measures law.
The ultrasound law was part of a bill that was struck down by the state courts last August because it violated a clause in the Oklahoma Constitution that requires bills to deal with only one subject. Republican lawmakers vowed at the time to pass it again.
This year, Republican leaders passed five separate antiabortion bills to satisfy the courts’ concerns. Mr. Henry signed one into law: it required that clinics post signs stating a woman cannot be forced to have an abortion, that an abortion cannot be performed until a woman gives her voluntary consent, and that abortions based on a child’s gender are illegal.
Two other antiabortion bills are still working their way through the legislature. One would force women to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about their reasons for seeking an abortion and then post statistics online based on the answers. The other restricts insurance coverage for the procedure.
Remember this in November, folks. Democrats are pro-abortion. Republicans are pro-life. Democrat governors veto pro-life bills. Republican legislatures pass pro-life bills. That is just the way it is. Republicans are deeply, deeply committed to the full humanity of the unborn – that’s the core of who we are.
Related posts
- Republican governor of Nebraska signs legislation to protect the unborn
- Nebraska Republicans introduce bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks
- How hard did the Republicans fight to stop taxpayer-funding of abortions?
- Scott Klusendorf discusses Obamacare, Republicans and the pro-life cause
Related posts on abortion
- How to take an incremental approach to the abortion problem
- Videos from academic debate on abortion at the University of Victoria
- Audio: Scott Klusendorf’s 35-minute case for the pro-life position
- Audio: A 55-minute discussion featuring Greg Koukl and Scott Klusendorf
- My own religion-free case for the pro-life position in plain English
- A comparison of embryonic and adult stem cell research
- Video: Cute 12-year old girl makes the pro-life case in a short speech
WINTERY KNIGHT 
WK,
Thank you so much for posting this.
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Found your blog by way of ECM’s. I usually don’t like to make comments in political or religious arenas, but a statement you made above is kind of calling me out. I hope to be able to make my point without causing hard feelings:
Quote: “Democrats are pro-abortion. Republicans are pro-life. Democrat governors veto pro-life bills. Republican legislatures pass pro-life bills. That is just the way it is. Republicans are deeply, deeply committed to the full humanity of the unborn – that’s the core of who we are.”
If one is to believe media portrayals your paragraph quoted just above is undoubtedly correct. But the media also misses a huge middle ground of people in both parties who do not hew to the so-called party line of social ill checkboxes.
I tend to vote Republican. I am at this point supremely disappointed in the Republican party and the primary reason is because or elected officials hew so far to the most extreme elements of there constituencies. The Republican party USED to stand for small government. Restricted government. Effectively, a government that knew its place. The core conservative belief in the right to bear arms descends from this idea. We have utterly lost our way, in my opinion.
On issues like euthanasia and abortion, REGARDLESS of one’s personal stand on the rightness or wrongness the federal government should never be the one to decide. It is not fine enough. To use language you would understand, I believe it is God’s providence to hold individuals accountable for these decisions. It is not my place, your place, or God help us a bunch of stuffy out-of-touch politicians to decide whether this or that woman should deliver her child. This has NOTHING to do with the morality.
It has everything to do with whether the government should be allowed to get right down in there between the mother and the fetus. There are MANY people who feel it should not. And in fact, this is what Roe v Wade is ACTUALLY based on irrespective of what you think the motivations of the people designing the law. Our government is too blunt an instrument to have any say in these very VERY private decisions. Even if it is murder… even if it IS… there are some places too gray, to fraught or too private for the fed to go. And man, this is one of ’em.
And a lot of Republicans agree with me.
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In addition: MY Republican Party used to concern itself with keeping the Federal Government small and allowing constituencies and governments in individual states decide the ‘personal’ laws… ‘states rights’, as it were.
Going back even to the Christian Coalition days the party has lost its focus on letting individual communities decide their own standards for social challenges and started using the government to push agendas that old-school (fiscal) Republicans would consider no one’s business outside a family or household.
I don’t believe a state government is a fine enough instrument in this case either, BUT at least it will reflect the ACTUAL constituency views better than the broad sledgehammer of Washington DC. The Republican party no longer considers DC as the very last place they should go to enact legislation, and so they run up just as much horrific spending and bureaucracy as any Democratic administration in recent memory.
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