Work was derailed Tuesday on a bill requiring women to wait at least a\u00a0day before having an abortion, with House members not attending a\u00a0meeting and legislators accusing each other of political gamesmanship.<\/p>\n
A committee of House and Senate members was set to meet to start\u00a0hashing out differences in the legislation passed by each chamber. One\u00a0House member showed up, then left and had staff retrieve her purse\u00a0from the room. It left the committee’s three senators unable to hold\u00a0the meeting and shaking their heads.<\/p>\n
“We’re not playing this ping-pong game,” said Sen. Kevin Bryant,\u00a0R-Anderson, adding he learned hours earlier that House members\u00a0wouldn’t attend, though the meeting was called last Thursday. “This is\u00a0a very serious issue.”<\/p>\n
He and Sen. Jake Knotts, R-West Columbia, took the podium in the\u00a0Senate to criticize the House members.<\/p>\n
The bill’s author, Rep. Greg Delleney, countered that he made it clear\u00a0last week he had to be at work Tuesday morning and requested that the\u00a0meeting be pushed back an hour.<\/p>\n
“They’re either being very disingenuous, or they don’t communicate\u00a0with their staff, or they didn’t grant my request because I had a\u00a0conflict, or they’re being impolite in their gamesmanship,” said\u00a0Delleney, R-Chester, the House’s lead conference committee member.<\/p>\n
Legislators say they’ll try again next Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“I will meet whenever, wherever,” Bryant said, calling it the\u00a0session’s most important bill. “It encourages mothers to think very, very seriously.”<\/p>\n
Both versions would increase the wait time from one hour to one day,\u00a0but the House wants to require a second trip to a clinic for the\u00a0procedure. Supporters said they hope the extra time will lead to fewer\u00a0abortions.<\/p>\n
The bill passed by the House last year would tie the 24-hour wait to\u00a0an ultrasound, which pro-choice advocates have said clinics perform in\u00a0nearly all cases to verify the age of the fetus. Two years ago, the\u00a0Legislature required that women be told they can view those ultrasound\u00a0images.<\/p>\n
Critics argued that requiring two trips creates a burden, especially\u00a0for poor, rural women who may have to take two days off work and\u00a0arrange travel to one of the three clinics statewide that perform\u00a0abortions.<\/p>\n
The Senate’s version, approved last month, removed the two-trip requirement.<\/p>\n
It allowed that information the state requires women to receive to be\u00a0downloaded and time-stamped off the Department of Health and\u00a0Environmental Control’s Web site to prove 24 hours had elapsed before\u00a0an abortion. It also required the Web site to include a link to places\u00a0where women can get a free ultrasound, to include religiously\u00a0affiliated pregnancy centers, if they want to get an ultrasound before\u00a0going to the clinic.<\/p>\n
Delleney said women can already get a free ultrasound at the pregnancy\u00a0centers, and the changes create a “sham waiting period.”<\/p>\n
But Bryant said he preferred that a woman go online and review the\u00a0documents privately over a day to signing the documents at a clinic an\u00a0hour beforehand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” 04.27.2010 I am honored that the conferees elected myself to chair the conference committee for the 24 hour waiting period (h 3245). Since the Senate is taking up the budget this week we won’t be able to focus on this bill until next week. The House conferees […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3540","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2gEQ0-V6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}