CONCORD, New Hampshire (LifeSiteNews) – The New Hampshire Senate voted down a bill that would have established a statewide “right” to abortion for seekers and abortionists alike as well as shielded the industry from interstate investigations relating to neighboring states’ pro-life laws.
Senate Bill 551 stated that “that every individual present in the state has a right to reproductive health care as defined, and authorizes lawsuits against any who tortiously attempt to interfere with such right;” forbade “government officials or police agencies from cooperating with any out of state investigation into protected health care activity, subject to certain exceptions” or “extraditing certain individuals for legally protected health care activity;” and forbade “malpractice insurers from taking into account certain provisions of protected health care activity.”
The bill would have made the current status quo in the state of legal abortion up to 24 weeks even more extreme as well as attracted abortionists seeking to evade other states’ pro-life laws. New Hampshire Public Radio reported that that last point was a particular draw, with practitioners testifying that it “would help them choose New Hampshire as their state to practice.”
Yet the bill ultimately died in the state Senate, deemed “Inexpedient to Legislate” on a 16-8 vote.
To pro-lifers, the outcome was a welcome contrast from the most recent abortion-related development in the New Hampshire legislature, when the House Judiciary Committee voted last week to shoot down a bill to ban late-term abortions and a bill to protect pro-life pregnancy centers from burdensome, conscience-threatening mandates.
Abortion is currently legal in New Hampshire up to 24 weeks, with exceptions for life, health, or lethal fetal anomalies. There are also no waiting period or counseling requirements, although the state does apply the same abortion funding restrictions of the pro-life Hyde Amendment to the state Medicaid program.
Twelve states ban all or most abortions, with a wide range of lesser restrictions also in effect. But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.
