NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation dedicates the 2012 edition of Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States to the courageous governors who stood up in 2011 in support of reproductive freedom in the face of unrelenting anti-choice legislative attacks in the states. Several governors exercised their veto power as the final backstop to protect women from severe restrictions on their right to choose. In particular, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) of Minnesota and Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) of Montana deserve special recognition for vetoing several anti-choice bills that swept through the newly anti-choice legislatures in those states.
On May 25, 2011, Gov. Dayton vetoed three anti-choice bills, stating that he was unwilling to infringe upon the fundamental right to choose.One of the bills was an unconstitutional ban on abortion care after 20 weeks that lacked an adequate exception to protect a woman’s health. Another would have restricted low-income women’s access to abortion in all cases except life, rape, or incest. The third bill was an egregious attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, an attack that many states faced in the 2011 legislative session.
Gov. Schweitzer similarly stood up for women when he fired up his now-legendary veto branding iron, blocking four anti-choice measures from becoming law, including a controversial amendment to the Montana criminal code that cynically tried to advance anti-abortion politics in the guise of protecting women from violence. He concluded correctly that the legislation’s “primary purpose and focus [was] to serve a political agenda, not to protect pregnant women from violence or punish the acts of offenders.” The other three bills would have restricted sex education for young people, banned insurance coverage for abortion in the state’s health-insurance exchange, and limited young women’s access to confidential health services.
We applaud Govs. Dayton and Schweitzer for standing as the last line of defense against state legislators who, left unchecked, aimed to systematically dismantle women’s reproductive freedom. We proudly dedicate this edition of Who Decides? to them.
