Cuomo Bucks Tide With Bill to Ease Limits on Abortion
By THOMAS KAPLAN

ALBANY — Bucking a trend in which states have been seeking to restrict
abortion, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is putting the finishing touches on
legislation that would guarantee women in New York the right to
late-term abortions when their health is in danger or the fetus is not
viable.

Mr. Cuomo, seeking to deliver on a promise he made in his recent State
of the State address, would rewrite a law that currently allows
abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy only if the pregnant woman’s life
is at risk. The law is not enforced, because it is superseded by federal
court rulings that allow late-term abortions to protect a woman’s
health, even if her life is not in jeopardy. But abortion rights
advocates say the existence of the more restrictive state law has a
chilling effect on some doctors and prompts some women to leave the
state for late-term abortions.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, which has not yet been made public, would also
clarify that licensed health care practitioners, and not only
physicians, can perform abortions. It would remove abortion from the
state’s penal law and regulate it through the state’s public health law.

Abortion rights advocates have welcomed Mr. Cuomo’s plan, which he
outlined in general terms as part of a broader package of women’s rights
initiatives in his State of the State address in January. But the Roman
Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups are dismayed; opponents have
labeled the legislation the Abortion Expansion Act.

The prospects for Mr. Cuomo’s effort are uncertain. The State Assembly
is controlled by Democrats who support abortion rights; the Senate is
more difficult to predict because this year it is controlled by a
coalition of Republicans who have tended to oppose new abortion rights
laws and breakaway Democrats who support abortion rights.

New York legalized abortion in 1970, three years before it was legalized
nationally by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Mr. Cuomo’s proposal
would update the state law so that it could stand alone if the broader
federal standard set by Roe were to be undone.

“Why are we doing this? The Supreme Court could change,” said a senior
Cuomo administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because the governor had not formally introduced his proposal.

But opponents of abortion rights, already upset at the high rate of
abortions in New York State, worry that rewriting the abortion law would
encourage an even greater number of abortions. For example, they suggest
that the provision to allow abortions late in a woman’s pregnancy for
health reasons could be used as a loophole to allow unchecked late-term
abortions.

“I am hard pressed to think of a piece of legislation that is less
needed or more harmful than this one,” the archbishop of New York,
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, wrote in a letter to Mr. Cuomo last month.
Referring to Albany lawmakers in a subsequent column, he added, “It’s as
though, in their minds, our state motto, ‘Excelsior’ (‘Ever Upward’),
applies to the abortion rate.”

National abortion rights groups have sought for years to persuade state
legislatures to adopt laws guaranteeing abortion rights as a backup to
Roe. But they have had limited success: Only seven states have such
measures in place, including California, Connecticut and Maryland; the
most recent state to adopt such a law is Hawaii, which did so in 2006.

“Pretty much all of the energy, all of the momentum, has been to
restrict abortion, which makes what could potentially happen in New York
so interesting,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the
Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
“There’s no other state that’s even contemplating this right now.”

In most statehouses, the push by lawmakers has been in the opposite
direction. The past two years has seen more provisions adopted at the
state level to restrict abortion rights than in any two-year period in
decades, according to the Guttmacher Institute; last year, 19 states
adopted 43 new provisions restricting abortion access, while not a
single significant measure was adopted to expand access to abortion or
to comprehensive sex education.

“It’s an extraordinary moment in terms of the degree to which there is
government interference in a woman’s ability to make these basic health
care decisions,” said Andrea Miller, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice
New York. “For New York to be able to send a signal, a hopeful sign, a
sense of the turning of the tide, we think is really important.”

Abortion rights advocates say that even though the Roe decision
supersedes state law, some doctors are hesitant to perform late-term
abortions when a woman’s health is at risk because the criminal statutes
remain on the books.

“Doctors and hospitals shouldn’t be reading criminal laws to determine
what types of health services they can offer and provide to their
patients,” said M. Tracey Brooks, the president of Family Planning
Advocates of New York State.

http://tinyurl.com/bgo2k8a
--
I'm a *Liberal* because I knew the militant christian fundamentalist
racist militaristic xenophobic corporate oligarchy wasn't going to work
for me.