Heartbeat Bill

Janet Porter of Faith 2 Action returned to Ohio to try to enact the nation’s strictest anti-abortion law, the Heartbeat Bill, but it appears that she only managed to divide her fellow abortion rights opponents and anger Republican leaders. In fact, relations between her and the state’s GOP officials have gotten so bad that she is now calling for Republicans in the State Senate to vote out their own leader.

The Heartbeat Bill, which criminalizes abortion in the vast majority of cases, had passed the Ohio State House but was held up in the State Senate. Because the bill is undoubtedly unconstitutional, the state’s largest anti-choice group came out against it, causing local chapters to defect and join a new group Porter had set up to back the bill.

Porter announced endorsements from Republican presidential candidates; brought in Religious Right activists for prayer rallies; wrote an anti-choice version of “99 Red Balloons”; ran ads on TV and in the sky; sent out advertisements attacking “RINO” Republicans; organized prayer warriors and children with teddy bears; claimed that the bill’s passage will allow God to bless America; and had a fetus “testify” at a hearing. One supporter in the State House said the bill was needed so the U.S. can compete with all the smart kids in China – he was later arrested for drunk driving.

In September, Porter pointed to a “miraculous” breakthrough and said that the Senate would consider a new version of the legislation just before the election. But the vote never came and after Ohio went blue and a majority of voters identified themselves as pro-choice, the Republican head of the State Senate Tom Niehaus weighed putting the bill up to a vote until declaring it dead. Porter, in turn, demanded that a Republican senator buck the party leadership and force a vote:

Despite what you have heard about outgoing President Tom Niehaus refusing to honor his word and bring the Heartbeat Bill to the floor for a vote, the Decision of whether the Heartbeat Bill lives or dies is in the hands of the REPUBLICAN MAJORITY--not Tom Niehaus!

If just ONE SENATOR will circulate a discharge petition, and 16 Republican Senators, who ran as pro-lifers, will sign it--the Heartbeat bill will come to the floor for a vote BEFORE Dec. 31, 2012--otherwise it will die!

Today, however, that plan failed as well as a procedural move made it impossible to use a discharge petition, and Niehaus put the blame squarely on Porter for her “over the line” tactics:

Faith2Action, the lead group pushing for the heartbeat bill, has called for GOP senators to sign a discharge petition — a rarely used procedure in which, if a majority of a chamber’s members sign on, a bill can be forced out of committee and onto the floor for a vote. But moving the bill to the Rules Committee effectively blocks that effort because a bill must be in a committee for at least 30 days before a discharge petition can be used. The Senate will adjourn for the year before 30 days pass.

“This bill saw some of the most-intense lobbying efforts in recent memory. That’s fine,” Niehaus said. “But threatening, in my mind, goes over the line. For a small faction of the pro-life community to target the most pro-life group of senators in recent memory was, to me, outrageous.” Niehaus wouldn’t elaborate on specifics of the “threatening” lobbying tactics.

Porter, of course, now wants the GOP caucus to remove Niehaus as GOP leader so they can vote on her bill before it is too late!

ACT TODAY TO SAVE THE HEARTBEAT BILL

It was bad enough when outgoing Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus broke his promise to give us a floor vote after the November election. Then he put out a press release calling us "bullies" because we have phoned, emailed, and visited our Senators. Now he has pulled another vindictive move to halt the Heartbeat Bill! Niehaus moved the bill to a different committee, to prevent a “Discharge Petition” from being implemented. A Discharge Petition would have forced a floor vote before the bill dies on December 31.

But the other 22 Senate Republicans still have the power to force a floor vote before the Heartbeat Bill dies. They can remove Senator Niehaus from leadership, and install President-elect Keith Faber now (rather than waiting until January when Faber, a Heartbeat Bill supporter, is scheduled to become Senate President).

Assuming that effort fails, Porter and her allies will try to push the bill through the legislature next term:

The bill’s death likely would be only temporary. The House passed the bill this session, and Speaker William G. Batchelder, R-Medina, is returning as speaker. Niehaus is term-limited at the end of the year and will be replaced by Sen. Keith Faber, R-Celina, a strong backer of the bill.

Lori Viars, vice president of Warren County Right to Life who has also worked to pass the bill, took issue with Niehaus’ characterization of their lobbying tactics. “It’s pretty arrogant to call a group of pro-life women ‘bullies’ because we’re phoning, emailing, and visiting our senators. Don’t they work for us?”

According to exit polls, 56% of Ohio voters said that abortion should be legal in all or mostly all cases. But that hasn’t stopped the state’s GOP-controlled legislature from pushing the ‘Heartbeat Bill,’ which would effectively ban abortion in nearly all cases. The House has already approved the legislation but it has not yet received a vote in the Senate, and radical activist Janet Porter has been actively campaigning against Republicans who have not signed on to the bill. Porter’s main legislative ally and the bill’s chief sponsor in the house, Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, is now working to secure support in the Senate for the Heratbeat Bill along with a new proposal to defund Planned Parenthood, even though the healthcare organization doesn’t use taxpayer dollars for abortion services and the move may not be legal.

The Columbus Dispatch reports:

House Health and Aging Committee Chairman Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, scheduled a possible vote to recommend passage of House Bill 298 for Wednesday.

Backed by Ohio Right to Life and other anti-abortion advocates, the bill stalled last spring over concern that it also would divert funding from hospitals, which was not the intent of supporters. The legislation would create a priority system for awarding federal family-planning funds, putting Planned Parenthood at the bottom of the list and probably cutting off about $1.7 million it uses for birth control and preventive care.

The money does not fund abortions, but supporters argue that tax dollars should not go to any organization that performs abortions.

Meanwhile, abortion foes might be nearing a compromise on the so-called “heartbeat bill,” which would outlaw abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected. That’s usually about five to six weeks into pregnancy, when many women don’t yet realize they are pregnant.

The Associated Press is reporting that Personhood Ohio, a state affiliate of Denver-based Personhood USA, will likely fall short in its effort to put a so-called “personhood” amendment on the ballot this fall:

With less than two weeks before a crucial July deadline, the group's director says it has close to 20,000, or 5 percent, of the roughly 385,000 signatures required for the proposed personhood constitutional amendment to appear on November ballots.

Backers of the state constitutional amendments hope to spark a legal challenge to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 that gave women a legal right to abortion.

The advocates of the Heartbeat Bill have proven their willingness to push one person out of the boat to try to save another. How? By way of the bill's exceptions, its inappropriate penalties, and its counterfeit moral standard.

Burress, who headed the campaign that successfully promoted passage of the state's 2004 amendment to ban gay marriage, said the personhood group is going to need close to 500,000 signatures ensure they have enough.

"Unless a miracle occurs, they are probably going to be looking at 2013," Burress said.

Ultimately, Ohioans have no business pointing our fingers at the Supreme Court, the U.S. Congress, or the abortion advocates entrenched in political parties for the shedding of innocent blood that Ohio allows. […] Criminal justice is a local matter. God's wrath abides on Ohio for the innocent blood that has been shed in our state, and God obligates Ohio to do justice to protect the innocent from assault and murder, and thereby purge our land from the guilt of innocent blood.

Until there is justice for the preborn, there will be no lasting mercy for us.

Janet Porter of Faith2Action returned to her native Ohio last year to pass the patently unconstitutional “Heartbeat Bill,” which would criminalize abortion in the majority of cases. Despite success in the State House the GOP-controlled State Senate has refused to even put the bill up for a vote, with the Republican Senate President criticizing Faith2Action for making “exaggerated and inflammatory statements.” While it looks like Porter’s Heartbeat Bill won’t make it to the floor of the State Senate, that didn’t stop her from organizing one last rally in the Capitol to push for its passage.

While the last Heartbeat Bill rally featured prominent anti-choice activists such as Lou Engle, Jim Garlow and Wendy Wright, her rally on Saturday included less renowned (but just as extreme) conservatives like Linda Harvey and Timothy Johnson.

Cynthia Dunbar, a former member of the Texas Board of Education who is now a law professor at Liberty University, in her address to the rally made the specious claim that “94% of the quotes of the Founding Fathers contemporaneous to our nation’s founding came either directly or indirectly from the Bible” and maintained that legislators shouldn’t worry about passing the unconstitutional Heartbeat Bill since “Roe v. Wade is not law at all.” “Guess what legislators,” Dunbar said, “you don’t have the freedom to make any laws if they are contrary to what God has said in his Holy Scripture.”

Watch highlights of Dunbar’s speech here:

Porter in a last ditch effort in WorldNetDaily said she is tired of sending teddy bears and flowers to legislators and instead now will send them postcards with a rhinoceros on it, saying Republicans who don’t back her bill are RINO’s:

After 53 co-sponsors out of a 99-member House, multiple rallies, billboards, bumper stickers, yard signs, television, radio and full-page print ads, five 5,000 red heart balloons, heart chocolates, heart cookies, heartbeat teddy bears, 2,200 red roses, an airplane that flew over the statehouse and demonstrating more support than any bill in America, IT’S TIME FOR A VOTE.

There are two basic methods of persuasion: the carrot and the stick. We have given these senators so many carrots, they have spit them out in our face. Perhaps it’s time for another approach.

They didn’t like the teddy bears and roses, so let me introduce a more direct approach, one that will not let them get away with further delay and more excuses. On neon-pink postcards, the 23 Republican members of the Ohio Senate are being asked a very simple question: Are they Republican or Republican In Name Only (RINO)?

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Why does an Ohio bill affect you? Because when Ohio protects children with beating hearts, other states will follow. Mississippi already has. They already passed a version of Ohio’s Heartbeat Bill through their House, but, unfortunately, their Senate killed it. We can’t let them do it here.

Someone has to break through the wall of Roe to protect unborn children, and there is no one closer than Ohio, who can send the most pro-life law in America to pro-life Gov. John Kasich for his signature with ONE SENATE FLOOR VOTE.

The Mississippi House passed a bill that would require doctors to detect fetal heartbeats, which in many cases would require a transvaginal ultrasound, on women seeking an abortion and without exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. An amendment that would ban men from having vasectomies failed to pass. The group Personhood Mississippi praised the bill’s passage, and said they will begin collecting signatures to put another personhood amendment on the ballot in 2013 despite its failure last November.

The bill appears to be based on Janet Porter’s Heartbeat Bill, which passed the Ohio State House and bans all abortions after a detectable heartbeat, that has been springing up in other states including Kansas and Nebraska.

During the debate over the legislation, a Republican lawmaker responded to claims that the medically-unnecessary procedure is “state-sanctioned rape” by arguing that women “allow ourselves to be vulnerable to a pregnancy”:

The Mississippi House approved a bill that would require women seeking abortions to acknowledge when unborn children have detectable heartbeats, in some cases necessitating invasive transvaginal ultrasounds.

There is no provision in the House Bill 1196 exempting women who have been victims of rape or incest from the transvaginal ultrasound.

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Rep. Rita Martinson, R-Madison, rebutted Wooten's statement, specifically addressing her description of the instrument.

"What do we think is used when an abortion is performed?" she asked. "What kind of device goes in and snatches a person from the womb, tears it out, and takes that beating heartbeat and kills it?"

While Hines and Wooten said the bill holds women responsible for an unwanted pregnancy while letting men off the hook, Martinson stressed it should be the woman's responsibility.

"Sometimes it's rape, but most of the time, it's not," she said. "We're the ones who remove our pants, are we not?

"We are the ones who allow ourselves to be vulnerable to a pregnancy," she said.

Janet Porter has pulled out all the stops in her effort to pass her radical anti-choice "Heartbeat Bill" in Ohio.  Over the last year, she has filled the Ohio House with heart-shaped red balloons, re-written the lyrics to an 80's pop tune, brought in prophets and apostles to push for passage, and even had multiple fetuses "testify" in favor of the legislation.

But still her bill remains stuck in the Ohio Senate, which is why she held another press conference yesterday to push for its passage; this one featuring children with teddy bears advocating on its behalf:

Christian Harrington didn't mince words during his moment at the Statehouse Tuesday.

The 8-year-old wants the Ohio Senate to take action on the Heartbeat Bill, legislation that would ban abortions within weeks of conception.

"I'm here to save babies with beating hearts," Christian, barely tall enough to peer over a podium, told a packed committee hearing room. "And I want to tell the senators to pass the Heartbeat Bill right now. And when I mean right now, I mean right now."

The youngster was one of more than 50 children who were in Columbus Tuesday as part of the latest attempt by backers of the Heartbeat Bill to convince lawmakers to pass the legislation.

They had a press conference with reporters, held a faux committee hearing showing lawmakers how to vote in favor of the bill and delivered Teddy bears, complete with real heartbeat sound chip, to all 33 Ohio senators.

"Do not believe the stuff the people tell you at the abortion clinic," said 11-year-old Sydney McCauley. "The just say it's a blob of tissue, and that is not the truth. That blob of tissue is actually forming into a baby."

Porter posted video of the event on her website yesterday where she explained that legislators had already heard from babies, national and local anti-abortion leaders, and the residents of Ohio ... so now it was time to hear from the children, like Noah who Porter held up to the microphone so he could explain that "I am 4 and I have a heartbeat":

After months of campaigning through prayer rallies and television, radio and even aerial advertisements, proponents of Ohio’s extreme anti-choice Heartbeat Bill finally inched the process forward this week as the Senate president Tom Niehaus and Health committee chairman Sen. Scott Oelslager held committee hearings on the legislation. But now, the bill’s future is in doubt after Niehaus abruptly postponed hearings on the bill, first proposed by Janet Porter and State Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, over intense infighting among anti-choice activists and last-minute changes to the bill:

Senate President Tom Niehaus, R-New Richmond, pulled the plug today on House Bill 125, the so-called heartbeat bill that would have been the nation’s strictest anti-abortion law. He suspended hearings on the controversial legislation until 2012.

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Oelslager had planned to only take testimony on HB 125 and not make amendments to it. That indicated the bill would not get passed this year as Porter said she was promised by Niehaus.

Niehaus said he doesn’t remember making that promise only that there would be hearings before Christmas. He again blasted Porter and bill supporters for suggesting changes Tuesday after saying the Senate should pass HB 125 just as it was passed by the House in June. He discounted Porter’s contention that the changes were technical in nature.

“After five months of berating us and criticizing us, with no explanation they hand me a four-page document with 20 plus changes,” he said. “Where were they? It underscores how complicated and contentious this legislation is.”

The Dayton Daily News reports that the National Right to Life Committee’s James Bopp testified against the extreme legislation, which is also opposed by the Ohio Right to Life Society:

The bill has divided abortion opponents, and James Bopp Jr., general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee, testified against it Tuesday. He said in his prepared testimony that he believes the ban on abortions after a heartbeat would be unconstitutional under current court rulings and would not stand a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.

He said that the “informed consent” requirement in the bill — that a woman be informed that a heartbeat was detected — would be useful legislation that would be constitutional.

Porter, however, rejected Bopp’s argument and said taking the ban out of the bill would “take the heart out of the Heartbeat” bill. Ohio Right to Life does not support the bill for reasons similar to those outlined by Bopp, but Porter and supporters say now is the time to mount a challenge.

Last week we reported that Janet Porter said she had the votes in the Ohio State Senate to pass her extreme anti-choice Heartbeat bill, which already passed in the House, and today the Senate President said he will send Porter’s legislation to Senate’s Health, Human Services and Aging Committee. Porter, who heads Faith 2 Action, helped spearhead a new group called Ohio ProLife Action to advocate for the bill after the Ohio Right to Life Society refused to support the clearly unconstitutional measure. Governor John Kasich, an anti-choice Republican, has yet to announce his view on the Heartbeat bill.

Aaron Marshall of The Plain Dealer reports:

Ohio Senate Republicans, under pressure from an anti-abortion group to act, will move a bill that bans abortions in Ohio once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, says Senate President Tom Niehaus.

The New Richmond Republican said this week that a four-month Senate impasse on the so-called "heartbeat" legislation has broken, and his caucus is prepared to move forward with committee hearings and eventual passage of the legislation. If the heartbeat bill becomes law and withstands any legal challenges, Ohio would have the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

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"I expect the bill will be moving to committee for deliberation," said Niehaus.

He said the intent would be to eventually move the bill to the floor for passage, although he couldn't say exactly what the timetable would be. The Senate is dominated by Republicans, who hold a 23-10 majority, and the GOP caucus is solidly anti-abortion rights.

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Rob Nichols, spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, said the Republican governor "has been consistently pro-life all of his public life" but doesn't generally take a position on bills that haven't reached his desk.