Sanders endorsed candidate voted to bar ACA from funding abortions, and requiring parental consent
For much of his first term, Mello’s positions were conventionally pro-life. In 2010, he voted to ban abortions after 20 weeks and to introduce new screening requirements. In 2011, he voted to bar the health exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act from funding abortions; supported a ban on using telemedicine to perform abortions; and voted to change a parental-notification requirement to one requiring parental consent. All of these bills were opposed by Planned Parenthood—and, given the realities of Nebraska politics, all easily passed.
What’s more interesting is what happened next—and what didn’t. In 2012, Mello voted with Planned Parenthood on two out of three bills tracked by the group—and was excused from voting on the third. After that, Mello, who had become the influential chair of the state legislature’s budget committee, voted with Planned Parenthood 100 percent of the time. By 2015, the group was celebrating a “fourth straight year…without enacting any new abortion restrictions in Nebraska, thanks largely to committed women’s health advocates engaged in the legislative process.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/04/25/why-was-heath-mello-thrown-under-bus
Mello’s critics, including Hogue, are absolutely right to argue against any political calculus that involves selling out women’s rights—including the right to control their own body. And to oppose calls to “balance” those rights against some imaginary gain for the working class (as if women didn’t make up a majority of the working class). Americans tried that once with slavery—and it didn’t work out well. But no one has a right to use abortion, or Heath Mello, or the working people of Omaha—black, brown, and white—who see him as their champion, as pawns in some Democratic Party power game.
Like many of his supporters—including some of his most fervently pro-choice ones—Mello told me that he would like abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her partner, or her conscience. So long as women’s rights are under threat, that can’t happen. But when I ask Mello if, when he says he “will not restrict women’s reproductive care,” that includes abortions, he doesn’t equivocate: “Of course. I thought that was obvious.”
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Shine the LIGHT!
