POLITICS

Head of NOW rallies abortion-rights supporters

Katherine Gregg
kgregg@providencejournal.com
Toni Van Pelt, president of NOW, rallies abortion-rights supporters at the State House Wednesday. [The Providence Journal / Katherine Gregg]

PROVIDENCE — Scores of sign-waving demonstrators and a cacophony of dueling voices greeted the president of the National Organization for Women when she came to the State House on Wednesday to rally support for keeping abortion legal in Rhode Island.

With no legislative compromise in sight, and speaking into a balky microphone, Toni Van Pelt had to shout at times over the demonstrators on both sides of the abortion debate, packed elbow to elbow into the "Roe-tunda" (as a news release called it) and the marble stairs that surround it.

"Let it out. Let it out,'' the abortion-rights demonstrators shouted so loudly that they, at times, drowned out the voices behind the closed doors in the state Senate, where a House-passed abortion-rights bill is currently sitting in a committee.

"Abortion kills a baby,'' the other side chanted.

With "pro-choice" demonstrators repeating her words so that anyone more than a few feet away could hear, Van Pelt told the crowd:

"In the last few months, we’ve seen a turbo-charged assault on reproductive rights from state legislatures and anti-abortion governors to consolidate their power over women’s bodies, turn back the clock on women’s rights, and put the health and safety of women and girls at risk by passing the most outrageous, immoral and unconstitutional restrictions and bans on abortion care.

"The Trump administration has given a blank check to the religious right to enact a fundamentalist vision of government that is straight out of 'The Handmaid’s Tale.'

"Donald Trump promised them a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade, and now that he’s installed two justices he picked from a list of anti-abortion judges, the race is on to pass a law that could attract a Supreme Court challenge to abortion rights.

"In Georgia, a six-week abortion ban was deliberately loaded with provisions that were designed to be challenged in court — like a provision that would allow Georgians to claim an embryo as a dependent on their taxes, and another that would count a zygote in the national census.

"Alabama’s abortion ban criminalizes doctors and makes no exception for rape and incest. Montana and North Carolina have passed so-called 'Born Alive' legislation built on junk science and political gimmickry.

"Fetal heartbeat laws, waiting periods, informed-consent requirements, bans on public funding, insurance prohibitions and unnecessary clinic regulations are not designed to protect women. Instead, they are designed to deter women from choosing abortion and to make it more difficult and burdensome to obtain for those that do."

The rally was billed by the Rhode Island Coalition for Reproductive Freedom as an "emergency action," with only weeks left in the six-month legislative session that began in January.

The Senate remains mired in negotiations over a compromise version of the legislation the House passed earlier this year to enshrine in state law the protections of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.

But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairwoman Erin Lynch Prata, a cosponsor of the defeated Senate bill, told The Journal on Wednesday: "We are making progress. We have been talking continuously and working continuously, so I am still optimistic."  She declined to go any further.

Advocates say the legislation as it is currently worded reflects the key words and principles in the Roe ruling and its legal progeny. Leaders of the anti-abortion lobby say it leaves the door open to "infanticide'' in the later stages of a pregnancy.

The actual wording of the legislation [H5125A]: "The termination of an individual's pregnancy after fetal viability is expressly prohibited except when necessary, in the medical judgment of the physician, to preserve the life or health of that individual."

A Senate version of the bill died on a 5-to-4 vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in mid-May, with the deciding vote against the bill cast by Sen. Stephen Archambault, a Smithfield Democrat who won reelection last fall while promising to "safeguard reproductive rights for all of our state's women."  

Gov. Gina Raimondo was not present for Van Pelt's speech at the State House, but Lt. Gov. Dan McKee was there along with a number of Raimondo's vanquished 2018 challengers, including former Secretary of State Matt Brown.

Democrat Raimondo instead met privately with Van Pelt in her State House office, and posted a picture on Twitter of herself standing next to Van Pelt and RI NOW chair Hilary Levey Friedman.