The anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee last week spoke out in support of a new abortion bill filed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami.
The bill, which was recently introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, would mandate states to uphold another state’s parental notification before abortion laws. The Right to Life Committee said the bill is needed because abortion providers are allowing minors to cross state borders to evade laws in their home state.
Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee told OneNewsNow:
“This federal bill that Senator Marco Rubio [R-Florida] has introduced would establish a requirement that abortionists notify the parents in such cases,” Johnson explains. “That’s to say an abortionist, when presented with a girl who is a resident of another state, would have to notify the parent back in the home state before proceeding with the abortion – and there would be a waiting period involved as well.”
Johnson also told OneNewsNow that state laws are “often evaded by minors who travel to states where no such requirement exists.”
As The Florida Independent has previously reported, this is a claim that is so far lacking data to support it. Ros-Lehtinen, who introduced this legislation in previous years, points to articles and reports from the 1980s and ’90s from five states as proof that there is such a problem to be addressed.
Johnson also accused some doctors of using the fact that there is no parental notification in their state as a “selling point”:
“We have many examples of abortion clinics actually advertising in neighboring states,” the NRLC spokesman reports. “And in their ads, they say things like ‘no parental notification required here.’”
This argument was also included in a report on an earlier version of the bill from the 2005 U.S. House Judiciary Committee as proof the law was needed.
