Minnesota Governor Expected to Sign Extreme Abortion Law
The Democratic-majority state Senate voted down amendments to ban third-trimester abortions and parental notification.
The Minnesota Senate debated for 14 hours on the Protect Reproductive Options Act (PRO Act) before passing it by one vote.
Gov. Tim Walz said he would sign the bill into law.
The pro-life movement has called it extreme, claiming that abortion can happen up until the due date and allowing children to get one without the parent’s permission.
I do not see that in the bill, but the bill is vague. We know the Senate voted down amendments to ban third-trimester abortions and parental notification. Here is the full text:
Section 1. [145.409] REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH RIGHTS.
Subdivision 1. Short title. This section may be cited as the “Protect Reproductive Options Act.”
Subd. 2. Definition. For purposes of this section, “reproductive health care” means health care offered, arranged, or furnished for the purpose of preventing pregnancy, terminating a pregnancy, managing pregnancy loss, or improving maternal health and birth outcomes. Reproductive health care includes, but is not limited to, contraception;sterilization; preconception care; maternity care; abortion care; family planning and fertility services; and counseling regarding reproductive health care.
Subd. 3. Reproductive freedom. (a) Every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.
(b) Every individual who becomes pregnant has a fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth, or obtain an abortion, and to make autonomous decisions about how to exercise this fundamental right.
Subd. 4. Right to reproductive freedom recognized. The Minnesota Constitution establishes the principles of individual liberty, personal privacy, and equality. Such principles ensure the fundamental right to reproductive freedom.
Subd. 5. Local unit of government limitation. A local unit of government may not regulate an individual’s ability to freely exercise the fundamental rights set forth in this section in a manner that is more restrictive than that set forth in this section.
EFFECTIVE DATE. This section is effective the day following final enactment.
The Democrats wanted to push abortion bills after the party took control of both chambers and the governor’s mansion:
“Today, the Minnesota Senate demonstrated that we will not simply put our faith in individual judges to uphold our rights and freedoms – we will also enshrine those rights into state statute,” said Democratic Sen. Jen McEwen, of Duluth, the lead author of the legislation. “Minnesotans now have an affirmative right to make their own decisions about reproductive health care. I’m proud to have taken this step today, and we will continue to advance legislation to ensure Minnesotans have meaningful access to the care they need.”
Dr. Sarah Traxler, Planned Parenthood North Central States’ chief medical officer, celebrated: “Today, the Minnesota Senate voted to trust doctors and our patients. The PRO Act solidifies Minnesotans’ human rights into state law and is an insurance policy that our rights won’t be taken away by politicians or judges. All I want, and doctors across Minnesota want, is to provide the best care we can to our patients. And by passing the PRO Act into state law, the Minnesota Legislature will allow us to do just that.”
This isn’t the end. The Democrats want “to restrict state grants for crisis pregnancy centers, which are nonprofits created by abortion opponents meant to dissuade women from ending pregnancies.”
ACKSHUALLY. There are plenty of pregnancy crisis centers that provide education for adoption, keeping the baby, and….abortion! Weird, tight?
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Comments
It’s not very empathetic to call it extreme. It’s only what’s right, in their view.
It’s writing for your base. What nobody tries is writing for the other base.
It’s murder. There’s only an evil base for that
Candid used to mean seeing the good in people, e.g.
Affectation of candour is common enough;—one meets it everywhere. ostentation. pretentious or showy or vulgar display. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone. (Jane Austen)
There is no “other” base when it comes to ethics and morals. Care to embellish the positive principles of The Final Solution?
A fetus is not a human. It’s human (not wolf), but not a human. A human in embryo you can say. That’s the other side.
You do realize, regarding, your logic is warped because your position is warped. When a man and woman copulate and create life, the life created is human, period. Calling the baby a “fetus” is the means by which you deny humanity to that child.
Here’s Stanley Cavell (The Claim of Reason), no moral or ethical dummy.
[against likening failing to see the humanity of a slave to] the condition of a liberal who fails to see human embryos as humans. The most a liberal thinks is that abortion is a moral option, that the cost in human suffering is immeasurably greater without the option than with it, and that the state unwisely or tyrannicaly exercises its police powers when it attempts to close off this option. The time may have come when the option of abortion can only be attacked on the ground that the human embryo is a human being…The trouble with the ultimate attack is not merely that the argument that human embryos are human beings cannot finally be won, but that the statement that they are cannot fully be meant – which is not surprising if the argument against it is exactly as strong as the argument in its favor. This is not a matter of a lack of sincerity but a matter of a lack of ways to express this sincerity. There is just one definite thing that the conservative does not want done to this embryo, and nothing at all, or nothing more, he can want done for it. There is, however, something clear he wants and something he sees and something he feels. What he wants is for the embryo to be seen _as_ a human being: he wants the internal relation between human embryos and human beings to strike you. He can see it that way, and demand this perception of you, because he sees that the human embryo is human (not _a_ human; but human as opposed to, say, wolf); you can also say that it is a human in embryo. This is enough to be struck and to found a feeling of abhorrence at the idea that this life should be aborted. A person can understandably be blind to these perceptions. I claim not to be, and yet I claim to be a liberal on abortion – not merely tolerant of it but passionately in favor of its legalization, convinced that those who wish to oppose it legally are tyrannical and sentimental hypocrites.
Evidently I abhor other thins more than I do abortion. etc. (list) unquote p373-374
That’s a nice explication of the other side, and is itself a demonstration of an argument written for both sides
Your problem is relying on the haphazard thoughts of others. The man who wrote that is fortunate he was born to a mother who valu3d human life above her selfish desires. Aside from killing an innocent life, which is always evil, doing it in the service of selflessness makes it doubly so.
My own thought was write for both sides. I got that from St. Augustine, though. Charity, he said, is seeing the best in people instead of the worst. That’s how it was soul-saving. Later it came to mean money.
St. Augustin didn’t foresee man who would voluntarily murder unborn babies for convenience and selfishness.
Another action of evil people is to corrupt the words of otherwise good natured people to justify their evil actions.
The question of what stage an unborn child becomes a “person” is a dishonest distraction. Given a pregnancy, after, say, a year, there is either a “person” or, if an abortion occurred, there is a “missing person”. A “person” has been eliminated. Any other argument is sophistry.
Gibbie, the problem with your argument is that it proves too much. You could make the same argument about contraception, or even abstinence. Every time someone uses contraception, or passes up an opportunity to have unprotected sex with a member of the opposite sex, a year later there is either a person or there is not. If there is not, that potential person is “missing”. But surely you would agree that no murder has occurred, and that these options should remain legal. So how do you distinguish abortion?
That’s why the key question is and remains when someone becomes a person, with the right not to be killed. Those of us who support banning abortion do so because we consider a 2-month foetus to be a person, so killing it now is the same act of murder that it would be a year from now.
Milhouse, You’re over thinking this. The question is whether an unborn child is a person. The argument is that an abortion results in a missing person – therefore the unborn child is a person.
There is nothing good to see in people who support murdering unborn babies. You’re evil and I will continue to call you such.
Evil is not so simple. It’s intelligent and goes where it will. To recognize it takes intellectual effort. Who can claim to be good at recognizing it?
Evil is very simple. Only evil people would want it to be complex. It allows them to get away with committing their evil acts without judgment or scrutiny.
Here’s Levinas writing on evil, in the scandal over Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies
It is impossible to be stinting in our admiration for the intellectual vigor of “Sein und Zeit,” particularly in light of the immense output this extraordinary book of 1927 inspired. Its supreme steadfastness will mark it forever. Can we be assured, however, that there was never any echo of Evil in it? The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. Who can boast of having done so? Say what you will, the diabolical gives food for thought.
15 November 1987
Your problem is relying on the haphazard thoughts of others. The man who wrote that is fortunate he was born to a mother who valued human life above her selfish desires. Aside from killing an innocent life, which is always evil, doing it in the service of selflessness makes it doubly so.
Don’t always rely upon the words of others. Think these things through on your own.
Your reasoning is sophomoric and fallacious rhhardin. There are some acts that are always morally illicit, regardless of circumstances and intentions. Infanticide being one example.
I find these excuses both distressing and revolting. I almost didn’t get born.
Medical science soon after World War 2 wasn’t as advanced as today. When my mother went into labor she started to bleed due to placenta previa (look it up). She also had fibroid tumors to make things more complicated. It was serious enough that the doctor went to my father in the waiting room and asked if he wanted to save his wife or the baby. Imagine posing that question to a young man who was dealing with PTSD from his war experiences! My father answered “Both” but I have no siblings.
Cheapening the discussion by implying or outright stating that the unborn child can go without consideration of his or her right to live ignores the point that a life cannot be simply discarded. Throwing out a deluge of words tells us all the process is obfuscation rather than stating a position. Don’t try to justify it. Justification does not exist.
“the doctor went to my father in the waiting room and asked if he wanted to save his wife or the baby.”
August 31, 1924, my grandfather Thomas Natoli takes his wife Florence, in labor with their first child, to Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. Some time later, the OB comes out and says to Thomas “there have been complications, if we can save only one, which do you want saved”. Thomas answered “my wife, we can always have more children”. The OB in fact saved both. And when son Frank was placed in Florence’s arms, one ear was pulled down to his cheek from the violence of the “natural” childbirth, and quite the black hairy ape, Florence pronounced Frank “the most beautiful baby in the world”.
I say that is exactly how medicine should work, to enable physical survival, even on occasion when presented with a horrific choice.
But that is not what abortion is today, a choice of convenience, making all involved in the process the most despicable people on the planet.
That you are evil and revolting is a given… what needs to be stated is how ridiculous and desperate you are to appear intelligent with your out of content and off the point quotations you boringly use… hey guess what we all can google quotes… nobody is impressed …,
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
— Emerson
You utter lackwit.
There is very little good in people who approve in the murder of an unborn child..
There will never be nothing more extreme than murdering unborn babies. Leftists are depraved.
On resurrection morning there will be more people rising from the landfill than many of the cemeteries.
Abortion is the wanton destruction of innocent human life.
If that’s not murder, I don’t know what is.
Interesting comment. I wonder if their attitude to “the wanton destruction of innocent life” defines Democrats in other ways? For example, how about their consistent view in favor of the perpetrators of crime versus the victims? Or how about being in favor of illegal aliens versus the poor USA citizens whose jobs will be lost, or wages reduced, or public education degraded?
They are the Party of Death.
After reading this thread, there can be only one conclusion. You are a thoroughly vile and disgusting excuse for a human being.
“A fetus is not a human”
Says who?
Whoever so says is empowering an individual definition of “human”, and thus of life protected by law.
In not that long ago memory, one of the most civilized nation states legally defined part of the population as “untermensch” and part as “übermensch” and acted accordingly, with industrialized methods of killing and incineration, a Planned Parenthood for the continent.
When you permit a variable definition of “human life”, you guarantee some extremes that you will regret, and pronounce “unintended”.
How the @#$! does one empathize with infanticide?
The Democrats want “to restrict state grants for crisis pregnancy centers, which are nonprofits created by abortion opponents meant to dissuade women from ending pregnancies.”
What’s wrong with trying to dissuade women from ending pregnancies?
What is wrong, according to the Left, is that by persuading women to carry to term it grants a value to the child and its life that the Left does not consider any human to have if they differ with the Left in any way. They won’t say it openly, but that is what underlays what they do.
Subotai Bahadur
For 100,000 years, women were the givers of life; men were the takers.
Who decided to flip the relationship?
We live in a maternal society. That’s why it has flipped.
maternal: of, pertaining to, having the qualities of, or befitting a mother:
To be a mother, one needs to not incinerate one’s young.
There is another explanation.
Nope, that is the explanation. We switched from a paternalistic society, where the man was the leader of the house and society, to a materialistic one where the woman is the head. Giving birth and being responsible for another life automatically gets in the way of that role. So that is why women advocated for abortion as means to prevent their own children from interfering in their ability to attain leadership roles, among other things. After all, men don’t need to worry about being laid up for nine months.
No to nitpick about language, but “maternal” has to do with being a mother, and “matriarchal” has to do with a female dominated society. I believe you are referring to the latter not the former, and in such case, I agree.
You’re right. I meant to use the word matriarchal. My word correction software on my cellphone is crappy. And since I can’t make adjustments after I hit submit it is what it is.
Not sure but the majority of women voters, at least in some jurisdictions, are certainly enamored with all things abortion, even late term abortions.
You’re assuming that women who abort their child are not coerced by men.
Coercion is not synonymous with compulsion.
I don’t buy “the Devil made me do it” excuse.
Neither does the Great Judge.
That isn’t true. Women have always been takers of life as well as givers of it.
Really… explain and cite the justification of the classification of women as “always” being the “takers of life”. I have to say I saw your response upthread to Gibbie… and I can’t in all honesty take very seriously someone who gets his legal arguments from watching Legally Blond
What the hell are you talking about? Are you on drugs or what?
Women have been killers since the dawn of time, just as much as men have been. If you’re unaware of that you’re unaware of anything. If you think women are not killers then you probably think American Indians lived in harmony with nature and never hurt anything without apologizing first.
I have no idea what your movie reference is supposed to mean. I never saw the movie and have no idea what ideas your delusional mind thinks I learned form it.
Sure Elle…. Whatever you say. And no real justification or citing anything. Just your unsupported opinion that women are and always have been the brutal takers of life…. A biological untruth. That women have and do kill is NOT the same as your statement implying women have always held the role historically as the sex that is the “takers of life”.
You and rhhardin are cut from the same bolt of cloth.., excusers of evil and trying to appear as intellectually superior… and failing. Sad really.
Thankfully, the Somalians won’t be aborting their children. Their families of 9-12 children will continue. Eventually, leftists just disappear from the place
I’m from WI originally, MN was the state most like Canada in those days
Nice hard working God fearing people . Huge Norwegian population, had many relatives there. WI and MN had many similarities as there were very similarities esteem the states.
I actually thought WI more “radical” of the 2…we actually had a true Socialist mayor in Milwaukee when I was a kid, and he did many good things for the people and it was a good place to grow up … then…
But the factories closed and went overseas, all the good things that come with making decent wages went away and
Now Milwaukee and the twin cities in MN are rife with crime/ murder. I believe Milwaukee is #1 for its size
Yeah, we’re #1…..
Not sure what happened but nothing, I mean nothing good comes out of MN anymore…
Federalism often results in the people of a State charting a different course than we choose for our own State.
Democrats: HOW DARE TRUMP RIP BABIES FROM THE ARMS OF MOTHERS AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER!!
Also Democrats: HOW DARE YOU STOP US RIPPING THOSE CLUMPS OF CELLS FROM BIRTHING HUMANS REPRODUCTIVE SPACES THIS VIOLATING THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO REPRODUCTIVE CARE! MY BISY MY CHOICE!!
Also also Democrats: JUST TAKE THE VACCINE!! DO IT FOR THE GOOD OF YOUR FELLOW CITIZENS AND IF YOU DONT DO IT YOURE A VACCINE DENIER AND MUST BE HOUNDED OUT OF SOCIETY FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!!
…. and don’t you dare think you can come to the US to play tennis (Djokovic) if you have not had the so-called vaccine that does not prevent you from either getting or transmitting Covid.
Australia enters the conversation.
We have at least 2 or 3 separate and hostile nations, cultures, and demos each of mixed ethnicity within one set of borders; governed completely by and for the benefit of only one of them. That is not stable, nor will it last.
Subotai Bahadur
New Mexico has abortion on demand until birth. They also are pretending that recreational pot is legal. That’s what our left wing governor and legislature care about. The ability to kill your child and get stoned.
Abortion is always on the wrong side of the scale. Killing isn’t a rights equalizer. It’s not only a thumb on the scale but the whole body.
Can someone tell me, from a legal standpoint, at what point does it become murder? If a woman delivers a baby, but decides to “abort it” and that infant is left to die unattended, is that murder? The child has been born. Or do abortion activists believe there should be a “grace period” before it is called murder?
There have been bills reported in Virginia and California that give post-birth abortion options. Not passed, but not rejected by the Left either. To be honest, in the absence of a pretty much universally accepted Social Contract [which if you haven’t noticed of late we do NOT have], the definition of murder is solely based on the power, pure power, of those who rule to declare what they want; regardless of any principles held by the mass of the people, to be the law both as it applies to the state of being human and to whether killing someone not considered fully human is a crime.
Subotai Bahadur
It never fails to surprise me that “Liberals” who would rather kill an unborn child than keep their legs crossed are almost invariably against capital punishment even for the worst kind of mass child-raping murderer.
Strange people…
Strange, but consistent.
Subotai Bahadur
To those attacking rhhardin:
I strongly disagree with his position, to the point where if I could dictate the laws, and he were to act on his beliefs, I would throw him in prison. However he is making a fair argument. He simply does not accept our belief that a foetus before birth is already a person, and nothing anyone has yet written here constitutes an argument that it is. We are simply asserting our belief that it is, and he is asserting his belief that it isn’t. That’s not going to convince him. I don’t know what would, but repeatedly asserting our position won’t do it, because he already understands our position and disagrees with it.
To illustrate this point, imagine that you are having the exact same conversation with a PETA supporter, not about a human foetus but about a pig or a chicken. Only this time you are taking the opposite side. He is asserting that it is a person, with the right not to be killed, and you are asserting that it is not a person, and has no rights. Every single argument you are making in this debate, he can repeat back to you in that one. And there’s nothing that is obvious to all that can distinguish the two cases. Rhhardin would be with you in that debate, asserting that a chicken is not a person — just as a foetus is not a person. The PETA person might well be claiming that a chicken and a foetus are both people. But you and I are in the middle, firmly convinced that humans, even foetal humans, are people, but chickens are not. How do we explain that? There are reasonable explanations but I haven’t seen anyone here bring them up.
PS: That’s what he means by writing for the other side.