The North Carolina Senate voted yesterday to overturn the governor’s veto on stringent abortion restrictions, according to the Asheville Citizen-Times. The law dictates certain state-specified information that doctors must give to any woman considering an abortion.
“Physicians must be free to advise and treat their patients based on their medical knowledge and expertise and not have their advice overridden by elected officials seeking to impose their own ideological agenda on others,” the governor wrote in her veto note. It was overridden by a vote of 29-19, according to WRAL.
The Woman’s Right To Know Act requires women to wait 24 hours before having an abortion, and must agree to an ultrasound during which the doctor will tell and show her detailed information about her fetus. She must also be offered a chance to listen to the fetus’s heartbeat. If she refuses either the heartbeat or the ultrasound, that information will be kept on record for seven years.
Doctors must also inform women of alternatives to abortion. WRAL reports that the law allows many people, including siblings, parents or former doctors of the woman seeking an abortion, to sue the abortion doctor for violations if he or she does not provide all the information the bill requires.
The Huffington Post reports that the doctor must also give the woman a document that says she is terminating “the life of a separate, unique human being.”
All Democrats voted against the bill, while all but two Republicans voted for it.
“There’s a lot of non-facts in some of the things that have been said — they make it sound like you go in to get a hamburger and you have an abortion, without any medical exams, no check-ups, no discussion,” said Sen. Stan Bingham (R-Davidson), the only Republican who voted against the bill, in the Huffington Post. “But the medical society strongly disagrees with this, and my daughter is a physician and she strongly disagrees with this too. So I’m trying to be open-minded.”
Bingham also said that he was troubled that the government would be involved in something as personal as an abortion. Meredith Hunt, a Life Advocates spokesperson in Asheville, told the Asheville Citizen-Times that the law makes sure women get all the necessary information.
“This new law gives women every opportunity to know all the facts about abortion and how they can let their babies live,” she said.
One Republican senator spoke about his adopted son to make his point.
“I will be forever grateful to a woman who decided not to abort,” said Sen. Jim Davis (R-Macon). “For people to suggest that 24 hours is an onerous requirement – I just can’t accept that. My son is worth 24 hours.”
Democrats, however, questioned this bill’s effects on women’s rights.
Sen. Linda Garrou (D-Forsyth) called the bill a “serious, serious assault on women. I’ve never heard as many bellicose statements about ‘get government out of our way,’ ‘get government out of our lives, and yet you want to make a decision for me, for women in general, for your wife, for your daughter?”