Two Abortion Measures Die In Senate But Expected Debate On Funding Will Keep Issue Alive In The Final Weeks Of The Session
A House proposal requiring girls to tell their parents before getting an abortion died in Senate committee Friday without a hearing.
On the final day for committees to act on non-fiscal bills from the opposite house, also dying was a House measure that would have required doctors to advise women of a link between abortion and breast cancer. That bill also got no hearing.
Both bills “got the fate they deserved. It’s difficult to think of an issue in this state that has been voted on more than abortion, and the people of Washington have said they don’t want this kind of legislation,” said Lonnie Johns-Brown, a lobbyist for the National Organization for Women.
Ken VanDerhoef, a Seattle attorney and spokesman for the anti-abortion group Human Life of Washington, said he was disappointed but also encouraged that the measures had at least passed the House.
The newly Republican chamber, after agonized debate, sent both bills to the Democratic Senate last month.
“Prior to this year, we were unable to even get hearings in the House. We’ll continue to work and continue to stay in the system and work it,” VanDerhoef said.
He added that anti-abortion forces have lost a powerful champion, Rep. Mike Padden, R-Spokane, who resigned last week to become a Spokane District Court judge. “But we have others in the Legislature who are very pro-life,” he said.
The death of the two abortion measures notwithstanding, abortion will continue to be an issue in the final three weeks of the 1995 session and possibly a special session.
House leaders have said they will hold firm on plans to strike from the new two-year budget money to finance abortions for poor women. Senate leaders have said they are just as firmly committed to keeping the money.
Such funding was authorized with passage in 1991 of Initiative 120, a measure that guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion up to the time a fetus could live outside the womb.
The parental notification measure, HB1523, would have banned physicians from performing abortions on girls under 18 without first ensuring that their parents had been notified at least 48 hours in advance. A judge could have allowed exceptions to the rule.
The other bill, HB1546, would have required doctors to advise women that preliminary studies found a possible link between breast cancer and abortion.