Anti-abortion activist center stage in Ohio fight
Given even a modicum of legislative power what you get from tea party legislatures is a flood of poorly crafted and draconian social legislation that can’t and won’t pass constitutional muster when challenged. They will cost their states millions in taxpayer dollars defending bills that won’t stand in the end, just so they can grandstand. I’ve said for years that the tea party is just the religious right in fiscal conservative clothing, and every single day there is more proof of that in the daily papers.
The heartbeat bill passed the Ohio House in June, with the help of Republican House Speaker William Batchelder, a fellow northeast Ohioan and long-time friend of Porter’s, who attended her 2008 wedding. She also worked as a spokesperson for then-Congressman John Kasich, now Ohio’s Republican governor, when he was chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee. She’s confident he’ll sign the bill if it makes it to his desk — though Kasich has not publicly made that commitment.
“It’s like every seed that’s ever been planted is coming up,” she said.
The bill must first get through the GOP-led Ohio Senate, where it’s unclear whether it will have the traction to pass.
Abortion-rights groups like NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio and Planned Parenthood and the ACLU oppose the bill. Ohio Right to Life, the state’s oldest and largest anti-abortion organization, has remained neutral, agreeing with abortion rights groups that the measure can’t pass constitutional muster and overturn Roe. The decision protects a woman’s right to an abortion up until viability as a matter of personal privacy, and a heartbeat comes before a fetus is viable outside the womb, they say.
“Ohio Right to Life has always and will always work to save the lives of the unborn,” said Ohio Right to Life executive director Michael Gonidakis. “We are doing this by passing bills like the post-viability abortion ban recently passed in Ohio. Our actions are part of a national strategy aimed at eventually overturning Roe v. Wade, and we are getting there.”