The Maine House voted earlier this week to enact a bill to expand access to abortions, putting the proposal one final vote away from going to the governor for her signature.
Supporters, meanwhile, said the change was necessary to give mothers a choice in heartbreakingly rare circumstances when fatal anomalies are discovered later in a pregnancy.
But Sen. Rick Bennett, R-Oxford, said changes were unnecessary to the current law that he co-sponsored years ago and was signed into law by then-Republican Gov. John McKernan. “This bill represents a fundamental shift from the uneasy consensus we’ve had in Maine for the past 30 years,” he said. that concluded women don’t have a constitutional right to an abortion, returning authority to the states.
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said during her reelection campaign that she was content with the existing abortion law, but she unveiled a proposal to expand abortion access in January in response to the case of a woman who had to travel to Colorado for an abortion after discovering 32 weeks into her pregnancy that her baby would not survive outside the womb.
Bishop Robert Deeley of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland called the bill “immoral” and said it went against the wishes of hundreds of Mainers who testified against it at a 19-hour public hearing. He accused supporters of the bill of bowing to “whispers of special interests.”
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