An abortion rights bill is headed to the Senate floor, and Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe says he’s “confident it will pass.”
The Senate Health and Welfare Committee on Wednesday approved H.57 on a 5-0 vote. The bill would prohibit governmental interference with access to abortion, and it also “recognizes the fundamental right of every individual who becomes pregnant to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child or to have an abortion.”
The committee amended the bill in an effort to better reflect current abortion practice in Vermont, said Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden and the committee’s chair.
“These very personal decisions are made between the doctor and the patient,” Lyons said. “And we want to respect that and continue that, within the scope of practice.”
H.57 is moving through the Legislature along with Proposal 5, a constitutional amendment that would protect “personal reproductive autonomy.” Both are reactions to concern that Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973, could be overturned due to political and judicial changes at the federal level.
Proposal 5 has passed the Senate and is set for a House vote next week, though further legislative action and a statewide vote would be needed over the next few years before any constitutional change would take place.
H.57, on the other hand, would take effect upon passage. It says no public entity can stop a consenting individual from choosing to terminate a pregnancy, and it also says the government cannot “prohibit a health care provider, acting within the scope of the health care provider’s license, from terminating or assisting in the termination of a patient’s pregnancy.”
Senate Health and Welfare’s amendment of the House-approved version of H.57 affects only the legislative-intent section of the bill.
The new language includes this statement: “Health care practitioners providing abortion care in Vermont make determinations regarding the provision of safe and legal abortion within the scope of their practice and license, and in accordance with the relevant standards of medical practice and guiding ethical principles.”
Sen. Richard Westman, R-Lamoille and the committee’s vice chair, voted to move the bill out of committee but said he’s not sure how he’ll vote on the Senate floor.
Westman said he supports Roe v. Wade. And he said Vermont abortion providers have developed “very stringent processes around when they perform those procedures and when they don’t.”
But he said H.57 “doesn’t go quite far enough for me” in limiting abortions later in pregnancy.
“I am not interested in condoning the idea that ‘anything goes’ in statute,” Westman said. “I am interested in preserving the thoughtful process that the medical community has developed around late-term abortions.”
Westman also said he was unhappy with the tone of the abortion debate in the Legislature this session.
“Vermont, I think, represents the nation in that the interest groups have more control over this than they should, and they want black-and-white answers to things that are very human and very personal and are very gray,” Westman said. “I resent the fact that we’ve come to a place that we can’t look at stuff the way the court looked at Roe v. Wade – in a thoughtful, human way.”
Ashe said H.57 now will go straight to the Senate floor rather than making a stop in any other committees.
Proposal 5 sailed through the Senate on a 28-2 vote last month. While Ashe said he believes H.57 will pass the Senate, he also said the bill may get fewer votes than Proposal 5 did, if only because the constitutional amendment calls for a statewide vote while H.57 does not.
“This one, obviously, is more of an expression for your individual support for the issue,” Ashe said.
The Vermont Right to Life Committee has opposed both H.57 and Proposal 5. On Wednesday, the organization released a statement saying H.57 “would be the most extreme pro-abortion legislation in the nation if passed by the Legislature.”
The committee also panned the advancement of H.57 ahead of the public vote anticipated in the proposed constitutional amendment.
“While the committee claimed they wanted voters to weigh in on the abortion issue, (Wednesday’s) action pre-empts that vote,” said Sharon Toborg, the committee’s policy analyst. “Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, unrestricted abortion would still be legal in Vermont. There is no reason to pass H.57 before the public weighs in on the issue.”
