Angry at lawmakers for ignoring their pleas, pro-life advocates in Maine hope to use a people’s veto to overturn a new law that allows non-doctors to abort unborn babies.
One News Now reports six voters recently filed a petition request to challenge several anti-life laws that Democrat Gov. Janet Mills signed this year.
“Unfortunately the legislature majority and the governor have basically disregarded polls and even physical bodies of people showing up to testify,” said Mike McClellan of the Christian Civic League of Maine. “There’s been a massive call to do this, and so we’re going forward.”
One law allows physicians assistants and nurse practitioners to do abortions. It passed the Democrat-controlled state House and Senate in the spring.
Mills, a pro-abortion Democrat, proposed the bill herself earlier this year. In a statement, she said the law defends women’s “rights” to abortion in Maine.
The legislation is part of a growing push by the abortion industry to de-regulate abortions as it struggles to find doctors willing to abort unborn babies. Eight other states also allow non-doctors to abort unborn babies.
Pro-life advocates have strong concerns that the law will put women’s lives at risk, as well as their unborn babies’. One study found that abortions done by non-physicians were twice as likely to have complications as those done by licensed physicians.
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Another new law forces taxpayers to fund abortions, and a third legalizes doctor-assisted suicide, according to the report.
McClellan told the news outlet that there soon will be a petition drive to overturn the laws. He said they hope to collect 80,000 voters’ signatures.
“You have to get a percentage of the past governor’s election — people that voted in the state election for governor, which was two years ago,” he said. “The number that I understand we’re chasing is 64,600.”
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 1,836 abortions in 2015. But pro-life advocates fear the new laws could lead to an increase in abortions.
Allowing nurses to abort unborn babies is one of the ways the abortion industry hopes to prop up its life-destroying business. Abortion rates are dropping and abortion clinics have been closing, in part, because fewer doctors are willing to abort unborn babies.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 1982, there were 2,918 abortion doctors practicing in America, but by 2011, there were only 1,720.
A number of abortion clinics also have closed in the past few years because abortionists retired and no one was willing to take their places, according to a 2016 Bloomberg study.
Randy K. O’Bannon, PhD., director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee, previously reported at LifeNews that abortion groups are responding to the shortage by trying to push states to allow non-doctors to do abortions and to legalize dangerous webcam abortions.
