Utah Senate Signs Off on Move to Create Legal Defense Fund for Abortion Ban
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 27, 2009
Salt Lake City, UT (LifeNews.com) — The Utah state Senate approved a House-passed bill to create a legal defense fund in anticipation of an eventual attempt to ban abortions. Sponsoring lawmakers want to create a fund to raise money to be able to afford attorneys to defend the ban in court after it is approved in future years.
The Utah House voted 47-16 for the bill earlier this month and the Senate followed suit on a 22-3 vote Thursday.
House Bill 114 would help the state pay any legal fees associated with a defense of an abortion ban through the year 2014.
Rep. Ken Sumsion, a Republican from American Fork, is the lead sponsor of the bill and he says passing an abortion ban now would put the cart before the horse.
That’s because abortion advocates are guaranteed to file a lawsuit against the ban once it becomes law and legislators will need at least $2 million to defend it in court.
The measure would create a legal defense fund that private citizens could donate to in order to defend an abortion ban they expect to receive approval of in the state legislature.
Rep. Carl Wimmer, who supports the bill, described the process of putting together a legal defense fund in an interview with the Salt Lake City Tribune.
"We are looking at wanting to ban abortion in Utah, period, end of story. However, we want to do it correctly," he said. We’re not going to back away from abortion. We’re never going to let it die."
Wimmer said a private organization has offered to defend the abortion ban, which would prevent virtually all abortions except in certain rare cases. As a result, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff "would have to give up the right to defend it because, the fact is, it would end up costing about $2 million, and we don’t have the money."
Wimmer acknowledges that Shurtleff is "passionate" about defending the ban and knows that he would have to oversee any legal defense of the ban as the state’s top attorney, so he decided to put the defense fund together.
The fund will be open for five years and, described the process of putting together a legal defense fund in an interview with the Salt Lake City Tribune.
A similar fund was set up when the state last attempted to ban abortions and it only received a little more than $12,000 while the state spent $1 million to defend the law.
According to the state health department, there were 3,338 abortions statewide in 2003.
The Utah Department of Health estimates that 195 girls under 18 had abortions in Utah then, according to the latest statistics available. Twenty-four of the girls were younger than 15 and 171 were 15 to 17.
Related web sites:
Utah Senate – https://www.utahsenate.org/perl/index.pl
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