Michigan Votes Forum

Introduced in the House on May 31, 2012, to require an abortion provider to ask a woman seeking an abortion if her husband, relatives, employer, the father or putative father, his parents or any other individual in a position of authority has threatened, intimidated, or coerced her into seeking an abortion, and require the Department of Community Health to produce information, screening tools, and protocols for this. Also, to impose more rigorous state “freestanding surgical outpatient facility” regulations on clinics that perform at least six abortions per month. Finally, the bill would establish that the remains of an aborted fetus are subject to the same laws that apply to the disposition of dead bodies of humans who have been born

The vote was 70 in favor, 39 opposed and 1 not voting

(House Roll Call 448 at House Journal 0)

Click here to view bill details.

The Republican's war on women in action.

Yes! Plain and simple answer to great legislation. The liberal left wing elected congressman/women will fight this all the way because they are on the same page as The President who supports partial birth abortions, same sex and same sex marriage and female genocide at birth.

This bill is an example of the Republican's war on women.

More ridiculous regulation being railroaded through the legislature for the sole purpose of furthering one party's ideological agenda. There is no crisis of coercion that this bill is tackling, rather this bill only puts up more roadblocks in front of a medical procedure that the Michigan GOP doesn't like, but can't ban outright. Craft a bill, rush it through procedure without proper review or debate, bar any dissenting voices from speaking against it. This is not Democracy. This is Fascist implementation of ideological goals. What a joke our legislature has become.

Political hypocracy is alive and well on both sides of the aisle! Representative Lisa Brown is all about keeping laws of women's bodies, but has no problem forcing her will on the rights of motorcyclists by voting against helmet-choice! "Keep your laws of my body" is not a one-way street! Conversely, Republicans should not be wasting their time with this nonsense. Not if they want to keep their house majority after November!

.....and now the liberal moonbats will start their attacks on granny over the cliff, women rights being attacked and dirty air and water. These liberal loons are completely .............off the charts!

For me of course I am against of this abortion. It seems that my spirit is already in hell if I am going to support this. pmp certification requirements

Senators Warren, Whitmer, Hopgood, Gregory, Smith, Hood and Johnson, under their constitutional right of protest (Art. 4, Sec. 18), protested against the passage of House Bill No. 5711. Senators Warren and Whitmer moved that the statements they made during the discussion of the bill be printed as their reasons for voting "no." The motion prevailed. Senator Warren's statement is as follows: Many of you know that I spent seven years of my career working for a women's reproductive health care nonprofit. Each year throughout my tenure there and now in the Legislature, we have faced the often overlooked, but clearly concerted chipping away of our fundamental right to choose. In that time, many of us in the choice community have been accused of claiming that the sky was falling--after all Roe v. Wade has remained the law of the land, so what do a few more regulations really mean? Well, women of Michigan, I hope you are paying attention because today the sky has fallen. House Bill No. 5711 is a shameless, backdoor attempt to shut down reproductive health care clinics in this state and make it impossible for women to access safe and legal care--plain and simple. Some of my colleagues will try to disagree, but this legislation is clearly not about the health of women and their families. If that were the case, we would be looking for ways to improve the "F" failing rate Michigan received on the National Report Card for Women's Health; or the 40th place ranking we received out of all states for infant mortality; and the 36th place ranking we received for low birth weight of babies born in Michigan. This legislation addresses none of that. Ironically, this legislation is not about reducing the need for abortion. Time and again, we have reached out and sought your help in improving access to birth control, family planning services, and comprehensive sexuality education--the policies that have been shown time and again to actually reduce unintended pregnancies and thus the need for abortion. Time and time again, we have been rebuffed in favor of these dangerous and punitive tactics. Finally, this legislation is not about improving patient care or safety. In fact, abortion care is already subject to the same regulations as physicians' offices and facilities providing public services like oral surgery and colonoscopies. Implementing these additional onerous regulations will only stand to increase health care costs for patients and drive health providers out of practice. So I can only speculate that that is exactly what you seek to do. In that case, you may feel that you have made great progress today, but the women of Michigan will face the grave consequences of this legislation--with their dignity, their health, and even their lives at stake. Even if they aren't watching today, they will pay attention and they will remember.

Senator Whitmer's statement, in which Senators Hopgood, Gregory, Smith, Hood and Johnson concurred, is as follows: I listened with great interest when the chair of Judiciary stood up and said that House Bill No. 5711 was prowomen. I have to tell you, you kind of lost credibility with a lot of us since your actions over the past week were claimed to be pro-worker. I have to tell you, I heard many of you scoff when I talked about the right-to-work legislation as being anti-women. I'm going to let you know, in the private sector, the non-unionized jobs, women make 77 cents on the dollar to a man--same education, same work ethic, same job. Women of color make 67 cents on the dollar. Unionized workers? Equal pay. So, yes, it's a woman's issue and your policies are anti-women. Your actions over the last two years have undercut your credibility to claim that you are pro-women and that that's what this legilsation is all about. Let's look at one of the times you've thrust us into the national spotlight--and when I say you, I mean the Michigan Republican Party--with your sexist behavior of taking away women's microphones in the House of Representatives when they dared to say the word "vagina," a medically-appropriate word used to describe the female body part. As a woman with two girls, that's how doctors tell me to educate my girls on their bodies. For using that word, the microphone was taken away from two female legislators in the House; their right to speech and their constituents were disenfranchised. It led to such national attention that we performed the "Vagina Monologues" on the front steps of the Capitol with Eve Ensler. Now this last election, I've seen Republicans across the country start to look at what happened, to look at the results and say, "Wow, maybe we've been too extreme, maybe 'binders full of women' and the Murdocks and the Akins of the world have led us to think we should maybe reconsider." So after this last election, there are Republicans who are trying to figure out, "maybe we are too extreme" but not the Michigan Republican Party. The Michigan Republican Party learned a lesson that they are not extreme enough. Maybe losing seven seats in the House didn't teach you that lesson. Maybe Mitt Romney, your home-state-of-Michigan guy, getting trounced by President Obama and Debbie Stabenow trouncing Pete Hoekstra didn't teach you that. I'm going to read you yesterday's Free Press editorial in response to your action just days ago. It's entitled "Lansing's war on women continues" and it says, "Talk about moving backward. Two bills headed to Gov. Rick Snyder's desk could transform Michigan overnight--into the nation's most regressive state in terms of reproductive rights. Already, we're toying with 'reinventing' Michigan as Mississippi economically with right-to-work legislation; now legislators want to make this state a cultural backwater as well. The two extreme measures were inserted into a package of bills to reform Blue Cross, Blue Shield into a nonprofit mutual health insurer. An addendum to one would allow physicians and other health care providers to refuse to provide services to patients when there's a 'moral' or 'conscientious' objection, and allow employers to refuse to pay for services for the same reason; another set of bills would require employers to offer, and women to purchase, an optional abortion insurance rider to have such services covered. When these bills land on his desk, the governor should send them back to the Legislature, and insist that these extreme, anti-woman measures be excised. We support the Blue Cross reforms--but not at the expense of women's reproductive freedom. Abortion is, by nature, an emergency response to an unforeseen circumstance. Requiring months, if not years, of pre-planning in order to obtain insurance coverage is punitive, aimed at limiting women's constitutional right to seek an abortion. The moral objection element is even more noxious. Michigan law already contains a conscientious objection for health care providers who don't want to provide abortion services; the new law is aimed at limiting women's ability to access birth control or emergency contraception. But the broad scope of the language gives wide latitude to health care providers who want to deny a patient any service deemed 'immoral.' 'It allows them to opt out of anything,' Planned Parenthood Mid and South Michigan CEO Lori Lamerand said. 'As for the insurance rider, the language of the provision is murky,' Lamerand said. It refers to 'elective' abortion, but doesn't really make clear what that means. 'As far as we know, it's unprecedented in the country,' she said. Hear that, Gov. Snyder? More regressive than Alabama. More regressive than Georgia. More regressive than, yes, Mississippi, which typically finds itself at the bottom of any tally of social or economic progress. Young people already have plenty of reasons to eliminate Michigan as a place to live and work. For folks in the 18-34-year-old range, our state is scarcely on the radar. Will a brand-new set of regressive policies change that? We don't think so, either. Snyder's mission statement on inauguration day was simple: Fix Michigan's economy. Make the state an easy place to do business. Make it a place people want to live. Neither of these changes moves Michigan forward. " And neither does the change in House Bill No. 5711. These restrictions won't do a thing to improve patient care or safety. In fact, it will actually drive up health care costs for patients and drive health providers out of existence. These politically-motivated regulations will make it more difficult for health centers to provide high-quality health care and only make it harder for women and couples to access critical reproductive health care services, including life-saving cancer screenings, contraception, STD prevention and treatment--a continued access to safe and compassionate abortion care. Denying women basic health care is offensive. It's wrong and it's out of touch, and I ask you to vote "no" on this hideous legislation.

Senators Young, Hunter, Jansen and Jones asked and were granted unanimous consent to make statements and moved that the statements be printed in the Journal. The motion prevailed. Senator Young's statement is as follows: Madam President, I think it's time. I think the people have spoken. I think that for the sake of this state, we need to get the government out from underneath women's clothing. I just don't know what could possibly be more personal or more intimate to a woman than the right to choose. I'll tell you a personal story about my life. Before I was born, there was a whole lot of hoopla, a lot of contention and things going on, and my mother was under a whole lot of pressure from a lot of her people. One of those people called her and said, "You know, you should have an abortion," and my mother said, "Absolutely not, under any circumstances would I do that." As you know, the rest is history and I was born. I've talked to my mother about this issue, and I said "Well, you know, Mom, wouldn't you be more pro-life because people pushed you and you didn't go through with it; you didn't submit under immense pressure. My father was facing death threats--all kinds of crazy stuff was going on. I can only imagine the amount of actual pressure my mother was under during that very dark time when she was in the media every other day. They were sneaking me in and out of houses because I was in danger. My mother told me that this was a decision that she made, but would she make that for another woman? Absolutely not. I think that really transformed my own mentality toward this issue. I don't think that the government should be making decisions for women about their bodies. I think it's wrong. I think it's grotesque. I don't think we should be doing this. I would urge you and I would urge the rest of my colleagues to let women make this decision for their bodies and for themselves.

Senator Hunter's statement, in which Senator Jansen concurred, is as follows: I have a quote, and the quote reads as follows: "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life that both thou and thy seed may live." Thank you very much, and I would urge a "yes" vote.

Senator Jones' statement is as follows: I will address the bill at hand, not the other dozen bills that the distinguished leader spoke of from across the aisle. The bill at hand does not prevent any woman from getting an abortion in the state of Michigan. It does provide that her clinic will be clean and will be licensed; it will be inspected. We had shocking testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee. We had abortion clinics from around Detroit that said, "It's not needed; it doesn't need to be inspect, We only need to sweep it out about once a week. We don't need scrub sinks"--shocking testimony. I asked, "Why is it Planned Parenthood clinics are all licensed and you're not?" The owner could not give an adequate explanation. When I asked "Why do trucks, refrigeration units, show up to pick up late-term abortions?" That's not done, by the way, in Planned Parenthood. "Why is that? Are babies or body parts being sold in the state of Michigan? What is going on?" I could not get an adequate explanation. I got a lot of vile language, but you know what? We allowed it in the Senate Judiciary Committee. We allowed people to use the word "vagina," and we allowed them to have vagina shirts on. We let everybody say anything they wanted, and then we considered the safety of the women in Michigan. This bill will make the abortion clinics licensed and clean and they will be inspected. I will remind you that 87 percent of the women of Michigan want this--87 percent. Even the women who said they were Democrat and pro-choice, 76 percent want this passed. I can tell you about the seventeen aborted babies in my district who were thrown in a common garbage dumpster. It was sickening--because the clinic didn't want to pay for an incineration. They were thrown in bags with their mother's name on them and other credentials, medical records. In fact, Bill Schuette got them shut down, and the doctors were ordered never ever again to do abortions in the state of Michigan. Lastly, this bill provides that the doctor will ask the women before performing this procedure, "Has anybody used violence or coercion--has anybody dragged you here, forced you to do this?" This is just simply common sense. Every domestic violence group wants this to happen. Vote for this bill; it's common sense. It will not stop abortions in the state of Michigan, but it will make them a heck of a lot safer.