Tag Archives: abortion alaska

Legislature passes bill that restricts abortions for poor women

On Monday, the Alaska state Legislature passed a bill that defines medically necessary abortion. The bill now heads to Gov. Sean Parnell’s office after the Senate voted to agree to strip family planning money from the bill. The vote was 13-7. Only one Republican, Sitka Sen. Bert Stedman, voted against the House version of the bill. Democrat Sen. Donny Olson, from Nome, voted for it with the rest of the Republicans.

The bill would only effect women whose abortions are paid for through Medicaid, which provides health care benefits to the poor.

The family planning money had been a source of contention and eyebrow-raising debate. Sen. Fred Dyson gave a speech on the floor in March, where he talked about doing research on condoms and concluded that women could access contraception in Alaska by having it air shipped to them. Republican Senator Pete Kelly said birth control is for women who don’t want to “behave responsibly.”

Most recently, Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux said nobody in Alaska was without access to birth control. “Other than putting contraceptives in the drinking water, I mean we’ve done just about everything we can do as far as family planning services,” she said.

At stake was money for the Alaska Medicaid Women’s Health Program, which, if enacted, would be 90 percent federally funded, and according to Planned Parenthood, would eventually result in net savings to the state of $8.9 million per year.

Sen. John Coghill, a conservative from Fairbanks who has long been fighting to end abortion, said that he didn’t support the family planning money because that money would make its way to Planned Parenthood, which supports “population control” rather than family planning.

“(B)y removing the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, the House made it clear that their only interest is restricting women’s pregnancy decisions – not promoting women’s health or reducing unintended pregnancies,” Jessica Cler, Planned Parenthood Alaska Public Affairs Manager said.

Planned Parenthood sued earlier this year against similiar regulations enacted by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

Kelly says that birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly

A few weeks ago, it was Sen. Fred Dyson, who said, among other things, that birth control was a “recreational drug.” Recently, Sen. Pete Kelly discussed the issue during an interview with Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News about Kelly’s plan to provide state-funded pregnancy tests in bars as one way to try to combat Alaska’s sky-high rate of fetal alcohol syndrome. When Hopkins asked if the state should likewise provide birth control, Kelly said the following:

No, because the thinking is a little opposite. This assumes that if you know, you’ll act responsibly. Birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly. That’s—I’m not going to tell them what to do, or help them do it, that’s their business. But if we have a pregnancy test, because someone just doesn’t know. That’s probably a way we can help them.

When pushed, Kelly said that birth control is “social engineering that we don’t want to get into. All we want to do is make sure that people are informed and they’ll make the right decision.”

Earlier this month, the House Finance Committee passed a bill that limits state funded abortions for poor women. It also stripped money for family planning, including birth control, for poor women, 90 percent of which would have been paid for by the federal government. Sen. John Coghill, a conservative from Fairbanks who has long been fighting to end abortion, said that he didn’t support the family planning money because that money would make its way to Planned Parenthood, which supports “population control” rather than family planning.

Perhaps the bigger lesson here is that elections have consequences. Fairbanks decided to elect Pete Kelly over incumbent Democrat Sen. Joe Paskvan, who declined to run on Kelly’s social conservatism.

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

Legislative action on abortion makes way for issue to take larger role in U. S. Senate race

On the heels of several anti-choice votes in the Alaska state Legislature, Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund have launched a campaign to educate voters about candidates’ positions on women’s health issues. The campaign, the organization said, will be modeled on campaigns waged in the lower 48 that have brought attention to women’s health issues and have helped get pro-choice candidates elected.

Not only will the campaign target state lawmakers, it will also focus on the upcoming U.S. Senate race in Alaska, which Planned Parenthood has named as one of its “top electoral priorities.”

This past week, the House Finance Committee passed a bill that limits state funded abortions for poor women. It also stripped money for family planning for poor women, 90 percent of which would have been paid for by the federal government. Sen. John Coghill, a conservative from Fairbanks who has long been fighting to end abortion, said that he didn’t support the family planning money because that money would make its way to Planned Parenthood, which supports “population control” rather than family planning.

Until 2013, abortion and other social issues had for years taken a back seat in the Legislature, mostly because the majority in the Senate was bipartisan and the predominant issue was oil taxes. That’s changed since the last election, when two Democrats lost their seats and the majority turned Republican.

This legislative session, Republicans have also been holding hearings on how the state chooses its judges, and whether or not to change the state’s constitution to allow for school choice, all of which have been on the agenda of social conservatives in Alaska for years, and all of which, when mixed with abortion, will provide fodder for Planned Parenthood to label those conservatives as extremists who are “waging a war on women,” a phrase that’s been used successfully in political races across the country.

The Legislature’s actions on abortion have also opened the door to make the issue a larger one in the upcoming U.S. Senate than it likely would have otherwise been.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Begich has been consistently pro-choice and hasn’t shied away from saying so. Three Republicans—Joe Miller, Dan Sullivan and Mead Treadwell—are vying for the Republican nomination. Miller is considered the more conservative among the three, but Treadwell has been running as the “pro-life leader.” Sullivan, who is Catholic, says he’s pro-life but has kept the issue on the sidelines.

Sullivan’s silence on abortion, however, will continually get more difficult as Planned Parenthood and other groups press the issue.

Indeed, it appears that the state is more pro-choice than the state’s Legislature’s actions would suggest. A 2009 poll was the last big one that I could find on how Alaskans feel on the issue. In that poll, Celinda Lake, who is Sen. Mark Begich’s pollster, was hired by Planned Parenthood to poll 675 likely registered voters in the state. The poll found that 58 percent of Alaskans could be categorized as pro-choice, while only 37 percent could be classified as pro-life. (The full findings are below, as are the definitions of pro-life and pro-choice.) These numbers appear to be in the ballpark of current opinion, according to local pollsters.

Women also vote in greater numbers than do men. About 257,000 men were registered to vote in Alaska’s 2012 general election. Only 147,588 voted. In that same election, about 248,000 women were registered to vote and 152,075 did so.

Here’s the full findings from the Planned Parenthood poll:

Abortions should be legal and generally available and subject to only limited regulation: 28%
Regulation of abortion is necessary, although it should remain legal in many circumstances: 30%
Abortion should be legal only in the most extreme cases, such as to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape and incest: 28%
All abortions should be made illegal: 8%
Don’t know: 5%

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

Treadwell calls himself ‘pro-life leader’ on 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Calling himself a “pro-life leader,” Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell put out a statement and a campaign video in support of anti-abortion protesters gathered in D.C. and Juneau on Wednesday, the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Treadwell is in a three-way race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. Since entering the race, he has veered to the right, most notably on social issues such as abortion.

“Every person has a purpose and path in the world and I firmly believe life begins at conception,” he wrote. “I have worked with pro-life groups in Alaska for decades. I’ve fought to help pass the parental notification initiative and to clarify ‘medical necessity.’ As Senator, I will fight to make sure tax dollars are spent to save lives, not take them away.”

Recently, the state passed regulations that dictate that the State of Alaska’s Medicaid program will no longer pay for abortions unless a doctor deems such abortions “medically necessary.”

Thousands of people protested in the cold in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. In Juneau, about 30 people protested in the pouring rain in front of the state Capitol Building.

President Obama also put out a release today. “We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom,” he wrote.

Obama also said that his administration aims to “reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children.”

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com

The fertile ground of abortion politics in Alaska

For all the fierce debates on the issue of abortion in Alaska — time spent discussing the ethics of it, various surveys put out by groups on both sides of the issue, legislative debates, political careers lost and found – relatively little is known about what the public thinks about the issue.

We do, however, know generally where our politicians stand. We know, with a few exceptions, that Republican politicians are pro-life. A handful, including our governor, are so extreme that they oppose even in the case of incest and rape. Dems, generally, are pro-choice and a small number are so extreme that they wouldn’t have support restrictions whatever on the procedure.

We also know that come election time, even the moderate Republicans tend to veer right on the issue, and some, Dems, though fewer and fewer, veer left.

So it came as kind of a surprise to me at least that the public was startlingly more pro-choice than their elected state representatives appear to be.

A 2009 poll was the last big one that I could find on the issue. In that poll, Celinda Lake, who is Sen. Mark Begich’s pollster, was hired by Planned Parenthood to poll 675 likely registered voters in the state. The poll found that 58 percent of Alaskans could be categorized as pro-choice, while only 37 percent could be classified as pro-life. (The full findings are below, as are the definitions of pro-life and pro-choice.) These numbers appeared to be in the ballpark according to local pollsters.

That said, you’ll find very few politicians in the state highlighting their pro-choice views. Begich, for instance, is pro-choice and he doesn’t shy away from saying as much, but you’ll likely not find mass mailings or TV commercials touting his stance. Ditto for Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

And until relatively recently, the other side kept relatively silent too. Marc Hellenthal, an Alaska based pollster who works mostly for Republicans, says that the first television commercial that he recalls seeing touching on the issue was one released by Gov. Sean Parnell in 2008, who then was lieutenant governor and was running against Rep. Don Young. That commercial was attacking Young for his support for embryonic stem cell research, which is a pro-life dog whistle.

However, Hellenthal believes that the pro-lifers have been emboldened enough by their recent successes in electing state pro-life state legislators, and with their successes nationally, that they will be more visible in the upcoming election. The pro-lifers believe that being pro-choice in Alaska will likely lose you a lot more votes than you’ll be able to make up, he said.

In other words, the issue, for those who support abortion rights, is a losing one, in Hellenthal’s estimation, anyway. And he thinks that those who are running against Begich will use it effectively against him.

“The pro-choice movement is just not as sophisticated as the other side,” he said.

Here’s the full findings from the Planned Parenthood poll:

1. Abortions should be legal and generally available and subject to only limited regulation: 28%

2. Regulation of abortion is necessary, although it should remain legal in many circumstances: 30%

3. Abortion should be legal only in the most extreme cases, such as to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape and incest: 28%

4. All abortions should be made illegal: 8%

5. Don’t know: 5%

Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com