An insidious non-binding referendum has appeared on the ballot in multiple districts in Massachusetts. Women, wake up!
This non-binding referendum reads as follows: Shall the state representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation that requires all non-hospital facilities performing more than 10 abortions a year to be licensed as “clinics” and to be inspected at least every two years by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health?
This was placed on the ballot by the Mass Citizens for Life in vulnerable districts as follows:
6th Bristol-Question #5
7th Bristol-Question #5
8th Bristol-Question #6 (Except New Bedford, Wd. 1 Pcts. D, E, & F-Question #6)
12th Hampden-Question #5 (Except Wilbraham-Question #7)
4th Norfolk-Question #5
5th Norfolk-Question #5 (Except Holbrook, Pct. 1-Question #6)
12th Norfolk-Question #5 (Except Walpole, Pcts. 1, 2, 6, & 7-Question #7)
5th Plymouth-Question #5
3rd Worcester-Question #6
4th Worcester-Question #5
16th Worcester-Question #5
This is the Texas legislation that was just partially struck down by the Supreme Court. Please spread this information far and wide. They have been very quiet about this. My town clerk was completely unaware of this ballot item until the ballots were released to her office. My representative (4th Norfolk) did not even know about this until tonight.
Mass Citizens for Life plans to launch legislation in January regarding this.
Remember, Charlie Baker is NO FRIEND TO WOMEN. Anyone who believes he is just a milquetoast, Massachusetts Republican needs to take a very close look at his endorsement of one Ryan Fattman–a Tea Party Senate candidate from Milford–who said that undocumented women SHOULD be afraid to report rape. Karen Polito is also an anti-choice, anti-gay Tea Party member. And just like Sarah Palin, she is a breath away from the corner office.
natashafatale says
This information from a South Shore activist friend:
” The first step is to obtain 200 signatures of registered voters in each of the targeted districts. ” Only 200 – you could get that in one hour, ‘targeted’.
Then this~”We have chosen State Representative districts which we know have high percentages of pro-life voters. The questions are not expensive to advocate because they are local. We are organized state-wide, so we have people to work in any district in the state. These questions are non-binding but will have a significant impact.”
They admit to garnering only 200 signatures in a district–that keeps this quiet–and they admit to targeting areas where there is a significant anti-choice voting block. So a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog!
Christopher says
…and for that matter not in general in favor of binding ballot questions. What I’ve never understood though is why abortion rights advocates get all in a huff about safety. I for one would WANT the assurances that a facility I go to for a medical procedure was a safe place in which to have that procedure. Don’t local health departments close food establishments for less? Also, why ten abortions? If even one abortion were performed I’m sure the woman getting it would appreciate having it done safely by people who know what they are doing.
jconway says
I think both sides used the horridly extreme example of the Gosnell case to argue for more or less interventions in abortion. Some pro-choice advocates claimed full federal funding would’ve ensured those poor women, many of whom were undocumented immigrants, would’ve found a safer home. Some pro-life advocates pointed out that he was abetted in dodging detection for so long since pro-choice politicians like Tom Ridge prevented full enforcement of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act (the strict one upheld by Casey v. Planned Parenthood) which might have stopped it. I can’t say for sure who is right or whether there is a mixed answer, Will Saletan over at Slate seems to argue that there is a middle ground on these issues and that many of them should be handled on a case by case basis with strong enforcement guidelines rather than blanket requirements on clinic capabilities.
The goal of any new abortion regulation should be ensuring safe access to quality medical facilities for women seeking their rights under the Constitution according to Roe, and the enforcement of similar acts such as this one in Virginia and Texas have had the effect of shutting clinics down and severely impeding that safe access.
I too, have long been personally pro-life but in the middle of the road when it comes to public policy on this question. I think they are certainly sensible regulations to consider: mainly maintaining the ban on late term abortions while adding stronger health exemptions, a very flexible parental notification law, and ensuring that all clinics are up to code and as safe as any other medical facility. There are better laws than this one that could do it. Inspecting abortion clinics to ensure their safety, promoting quality controls, and ensuring licensed and trained staff are the ones performing the procedure is absolutely essential to maintaining a protected right to choose in my book, and shouldn’t be a political third rail. But, those regulations should also not be used as back door anti-abortion bans either, which these seemed designed to do based on the Texas implementation record.
I think Pope Francis has eloquently illustrated that abortion is merely one symptom of a throwaway market oriented culture that values the pursuit of material goods over human welfare. Mitigating income inequality, ending education and health care access disparities, health care for all starting with our children and prenatal care, paid maternity and paternity leave, adoption funding, and maybe even a basic income would do far more to reduce abortion rates than this or any other restrictive policy. Easy no hassle access to contraception and strong sex ed programs will also ensure unwanted pregnancies don’t occur in the first place. That is the most balanced policy in me view.
natashafatale says
jconway, but if you are espousing the Clinton Doctrine of “Safe, Legal, and Rare,” we would agree.
jconway says
Re-read my comments, I am in fact 100% in agreement with your original post and essentially agree with the Clinton Doctrine, but would argue the onus is on our side to do a whole lot more to keep abortion rare-and most of that can be achieved through the broader progressive economic policies we tend to favor anyway.
jconway says
I don’t see how that statement could be misinterpreted.
natashafatale says
Read your post too quickly. But, affordability has to be part of the process as well.
The “rare” part is the hard part, but rates have been going down. Under Bush, they went up as access to education and birth control became a problem under his doctrine.
jconway says
And that’s my whole point, 7 out of 10 abortions are for economic reasons. If we can truly make a dent in economic inequality we can reduce abortions up to 70%. They are 50% lower in Germany and 30% lower in Sweden then they are here.
natashafatale says
Keep in mind, however, some are definitely for health reasons. Especially late term. Those are not done for fun and games and anyone who says they are is off the reservation.
whoaitsjoe says
if I had to hazard a guess, it would be them being labeled as “clinics”, so that you could pass legislation later to close “clinics”.
centralmassdad says
It is a little like requiring your dentist to have an intensive care unit and cardiac surgeon sitting in the office, just in case. The object is to make the whole thing as presently structured, which is not unsafe, to be prohibitively expensive, and thus close the providers.
The number of abortion clinics thing, I believe, is just to give the lawyers something about which to say “see, this is reasonable……zzzz.”
As to why anyone should give a fig about local non-binding resolutions, I don’t know. Has anyone in the Mass. legislature introduced this bill?
natashafatale says
Mass Citizens for Life will work to get this in legislative session in January.
Non-binding resolutions generally don’t bother me a bit. But, this is the slippery slope. And if you are a woman, you know what that means.
They get this passed in the districts targeted–and they probably will because it looks like a good idea–and then they hammer they reps in these districts to co-sign the legislation. And so it begins. The next thing you know, Blue Mass looks like Texas.
Kevin L says
Here’s their press release on the non-binding question.
natashafatale says
Christopher. It IS NOT ABOUT SAFETY. If it were, we would be ALL for it. Why are they targeting ONLY women’s reproductive facilities? Why not facilities that offer endoscopy (very invasive), or any other kind of “invasive” procedure? (And, btw, abortion is one of the lesser invasive procedures done.) Does not happen–ask Joan Rivers. That is because this is the “tip of the iceberg” kind of thing. Also known as a TRAP referendum (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Procedures and Providers), it appears to care about women’s health when the actual end goal is to close all facilities that provide abortion. Remember, 97% of all services offered at such facilities are things such as birth control information/prescriptions, sexual health services,
gyn, and counseling about all of the above. Protect women? How? By denying them access to affordable healthcare?
Every healthcare facility is governed by a board of health with regulations in place to safeguard the patient–from your dentist to your manicurist, safety regulations are in place. As to whether a particular facility abides by all of the regulations, that is another issue and one much harder to control. Again, ask Joan Rivers. And we all hope that our dentist, our manicurist, our doctor abides by the rules and regulations regarding safety.
David says
These proposals have nothing to do with safety. They are all about increasing onerous regulations in order to increase expenses to the point that they force certain facilities to close.
jconway says
You’re among friends, but Christopher’s question illustrates how pernicious the phrasing of these questions can be. A lot of people like Christopher, or me for that matter, people that don’t personally like abortion but respect it’s constitutionality-we are the ones these bills are targeted towards. I for one would vote against it, partly since it’s non-binding but also since it is far too open ended of a law to be anything other than a smokescreen for clinic closure, as it was in Virginia and Texas.
America actually has significantly more liberal abortion policies than European social democracies in terms of how late elective abortions can occur, but since they have full universal healthcare what abortions they do allow are fully covered by the state. That might be a more sensible compromise. Funding in exchange for more oversight and control.
Women in Sweden have full choice up to 18 weeks (which is less liberal than the US), any after that have to get approved by a three doctor panel, which includes a mental health physician, before the abortion can proceed. Their abortion rate is significantly lower than ours, due in part to more a more generous social safety net and higher economic equality, and what abortions they do have are significantly safer and occur in earlier trimesters. There is no significant controversy in that country, since the legislation legalizing the procedure was hammered out in the legislative branch and all sides had a say and a compromise solution was developed.
natashafatale says
we were Sweden. I don’t think anyone would say they “like” abortion. Even strong advocates for Choice like myself. That becomes part of the problem–nuance. But, you and I know that the opposite–no abortions–causes much more grave health situations for women. Not everyone would agree with that.
jconway says
Well some pro-choice advocates are saying abortions should be celebrated, that the ‘safe legal and rare’ tone only helps the other side. I disagree with that entirely. I think we are striving to create a more just and compassionate society, and I think some of the grassroots opponents of abortion feel the same way, they just fail to realize the destructive ends their means would cause. I want a world where abortion is legal and never considered since every pregnancy is a wanted one, and every child will truly have equality of opportunity. It’s a pity how much time and money we have wasted on an issue the court settled 40 years ago, that could have been spent actually solving the root causes of the conditions that led to higher abortions. But they have decisively lost on marriage equality, long ago lost on the economy, so abortion is really the last front the right has left to keep working folks voting for them.
natashafatale says
…so true.
whoaitsjoe says
How mandating a health department inspection every two years is going to deny women affordable healthcare.
If anything, your Joan Rivers example goes to show that more inspections are needed rather than less.
natashafatale says
but what will be introduced is much more than inspection. They will be put under onerous expense and many facilities will close. Jconway is correct about Texas and Virginia. Again, whoaitsjoe, it is not about safety. Facilities and people who do not follow the rules are hard to monitor on an every day basis. People die from medical mistakes in the finest hospitals in the country every day. Are you going to shut them all down? Place impossible rules on them? I think not.
Christopher says
Part of why I’m not a fan of direct democracy is I expect legislators to make actual law and figure out what constitutes an inspection, license requirements, etc. Regulations as with anything else that is legal should be enough to maintain health and safety, but not so overburdensome as to stop the activity. I’m not the expert on what this would mean, but certainly any clinic should be safe to perform this procedure if it performs it at all regardless of what proportion of its business is abortion. To me there has always been a bit of irony in the idea that a large part of the reason for abortion to be legal is that women will not resort to back alley procedures which are unsafe, yet when the procedure is brought into the open people object to making absolutely sure it is safe.
petr says
The intense scrutiny given to this subject, I tend to believe, is impetus enough for safety: If doctor/nurses provides the service under a microscope, I daresay he/she isn’t going to be sloppy about it… The last thing the pro-choice side needs is side effects from poor performance.
There are often two prongs to this attack — and it is an attack. The first prong of the attack is to hassle those seeking abortions and the second prong is to hassle those providing abortions. This law targets the providers. Doctors and clinic administrators, and nurses, face a range of pressures to perform these procedures and this law attempts to apply a little more pressure to an already overheating situation. To get a doctor or nurse to throw up his/her hands and say ‘why bother’ is the goal here, not safety.
The Texas law that somebody mentioned above also mandated sonograms for all females seeking abortions. Other states (Virginia, in particular) mandated trans-vaginal ultrasounds. They did this for no other reason than to make the seeking of an abortion an even larger hassle than it otherwise would be: By and large the women who are seeking help from the clinic already have to face the tough decision to abort as well as the ‘counselors’ parked outside the clinic and an already stressful situation is made more stressful.
This law is ‘non-binding’ but anti-abortion activists play a long game: this may just be testing the waters. Expect more to come.
natashafatale says
The text is intentionally misleading. What person wouldn’t want ANY health facility to be under the inspection laws of a board of health? That is why I brought in dentists—and manicurists! If you touch any part of the human body in this state (LEGALLY, let me add), you fall under the licensing and inspection laws of the Commonwealth. Do you or anyone else think that you can just open a facility and run with it? How would we know if you were truly a doctor, or even a manicurist? How would we know you were clean? We have come to take for granted that when someone hangs out a shingle of any kind, doctor, lawyer, hairdresser, they are licensed and inspected.
The true point of these TRAP laws–as has been stated repeatedly by many in this thread–is to make abortion unsafe and illegal. Period.
ChiliPepr says
It is the same reason that all the 2nd Amendment people so strongly oppose any “reasonable” laws that are put on the ballot. They “claim” that the laws are really a way to get all firearms completely outlawed.
Christopher says
…rightly say that such claims are bogus. Regarding the clinics I say debate each proposed regulation on its own merits and resist the temptation to invoke the logical fallacy of the slippery slope.
centralmassdad says
I have always thought that the gun regulation and abortion regulation issues are both hopelessly polarized because of the profound mistrust created by fake reasonableness in support of superficially reasonable incremental restriction.
Christopher says
THAT is the point you need to make.
Christopher says
I know about trap laws and understand the concern about them, but I never realized that “trap” in this context was an acronym.