N.H. House rejects post-viability limit on abortion

All nine months: that’s how far into pregnancy abortion is legal in New Hampshire. Viable, non-viable, with or without “anomalies”: all irrelevant. What’s more, any abortion-minded woman in New Hampshire is entitled to a dead baby, not merely a terminated pregnancy.

Rep. Keith Murphy and ten co-sponsors brought forward HB 578 in an effort to push back against that bit of barbarity. Murphy took Justice Blackmun at his word as expressed in Roe v. Wade: the state may assert an interest in the preborn child once that child is viable.

The New Hampshire House had a chance to stand with Murphy. The House refused.

Murphy’s clean bill, the one he introduced, was weakened in committee. The clean bill never came up today. The question before the House was whether to adopt the committee amendment, which while inferior to the original bill, kept alive (you’ll pardon the expression) the idea that aborting children at eight or nine months’ gestation is something to be more-or-less avoided.

The amendment was defeated , 170-189.  After that, the bill itself was swiftly tabled.

Somewhere, Kermit Gosnell is smiling. If his life sentence is ever somehow shortened, he can come set up shop in New Hampshire. Among the Pennsylvania laws he violated was one barring abortion beyond a certain point in pregnancy. In New Hampshire, there’s no such limit to ignore.

Both Murphy’s bill and the committee amendment left the determination of viability to the abortionist. That’s quite a concession.

Not enough for the abortion advocates, though. I sat in the gallery today and listened to one of them, Rep. Ebel of New London, condemn both the underlying bill and the proposed amendment, saying they “roll back existing rights” and would interfere with “private medical decisions.”

Murphy’s bill called for a second doctor to be present at the abortion of a viable fetus so that if such a fetus were to survive the attempted abortion, the little one could be cared for, provided that doing so would not endanger the life of the mother. The committee amendment dispensed with that provision, and it still didn’t pass.

That would have “roll[ed] back existing rights”…the right to a dead child, I guess, not merely a terminated pregnancy.

Rep. Claire Rouillard, whose name was on the committee amendment, calmly yet forcefully argued for its adoption. She should give lessons in legislative deportment. Her amendment would have okayed post-viability abortion for “anomalies incompatible with life,” among several other reasons.

Would an abortionist declare a child with “anomalies incompatible with life” to be viable in the first place? Absurd, but it apparently made sense to a majority of people on the Judiciary Committee, which gives me pause. Someone in there thought the bill stood a better chance of passage with the amendment.

Bit of a miscalculation, that.

I love my state deeply. At the same time – and probably because I love my state – I’m ashamed that we’re one of seven states where Kermit Gosnell would feel right at home.

I hope Rep. Murphy will forgive me for quoting extensively from a public Facebook post he made following the tabling of his bill. He is disheartened. (I sympathize.) He started his post by naming the thirty or so Republicans, plus one Libertarian, who joined Democrats in opposing the amendment.

In a later comment on his post, he acknowledged that two Democrats bucked their colleagues on this one: Raymond Gagnon and Jean Jeudy. Good for them.

Murphy acknowledged that a few of those GOP reps might have opposed the amendment because it weakened the original, but he knows better than to give that much credit to all of them.

Most simply opposed the state protecting the lives of unborn children at any moment prior to birth, even when those children could survive outside the womb.

[Update: Rep. Murphy revised his post within four days to indicate five Republicans who voted against the amendment but supported the underlying bill. Those reps are Anne Copp, David Danielson, Jess Edwards, Robert L’Heureux, and Kurt Wuelper.]

Murphy has a touching faith in the GOP platform, which supports the right to life even if some Republican officeholders don’t. And he has something to say to pro-life activists, even if it makes them indignant.

I will not sponsor this bill again until and unless there is both a solid majority of real Republicans who will support it and a commitment by the pro-life community to drum up support and educate the public about the fact that late term abortions are legal in our state. Ultimately those Republicans who find nothing wrong with abortions at 34 weeks need to be defeated in their next primary and replaced with people true to our platform.

…I appreciate the work that several reps put into the bill, and those of you that did try to get emails out to the representatives about the issue….This was the bill I cared about most this year. It was the most consequential bill I filed, and I worked for it. I’m pretty disappointed with the outcome; I truly believe lives hung in the balance and because of the above [GOP] representatives those lives are lost.

Other representatives may yet pick up the banner this year, if parliamentary procedure permits. We shall see. The man who moved to table the bill following rejection of the amendment was Rep. Joe Hagan, chairman of Judiciary, who in very hasty remarks indicated that he thought the bill was salvageable.

Perhaps some of the 280 reps who voted to table the bill agreed with him. Others were probably whistling “Another One Bites the Dust” under their breath.