There’s been some confusion today about State Senator Terri Bonoff’s commitment or lack thereof for the Grieving Parents Act, I’ll try to clear it up. This gets a bit long, so here’s the short story: This is a bill that was authored by Republican State Rep. Laura Brod, Terri was sympathetic to the bill but agreed to sponsor it only under the assurance that it wouldn’t become a vehicle for pro-life forces, she got this assurance from Brod, but over the course of the bill’s progress through the State Legislature changes were made to subvert this assurance and Terri accordingly withdrew her support. But, let’s elaborate on all of this.
First of all, the content of the bill has been misunderstood for some time now. Activists on the left claim it’s pro-life, activists on the right claim it’s not pro-life enough, and they’re both mistaken. The primary purpose of the bill was to provide mothers who go through the painful personal experience of a stillbirth notification of her rights to arrange for burial or cremation of the fetus. It can’t be understated how traumatic this experience can be and the bill’s core purpose is to help them through this difficult experience. Senator Bonoff states that this is how the bill was originally presented to her by Rep. Laura Brod and that she was sympathetic to both the purpose of the bill and the women she spoke to who were advocating for it.
What Terri did not want, however, was for this bill to become an unwarranted infringement upon a woman’s right to choose–she told Brod that if it became that she’d “drop it like a hot potato”–and so consulted some women’s groups for their opinions. The Senator purports that the initial response of these groups was neutral. As the 2007 session wore on, Bonoff recieved worried feedback from some women’s group’s. They were concerned that the bill could easily be hijacked by anti-choice groups. In response, Bonoff decided to delay requesting a hearing for the bill until she could be sure that pro-choice groups were on board.
During the interim, Brod confirmed Bonoff’s worst fears by submitting language to stakeholder groups that worried them. The language used suspicious language (”miscarriage” is not a statutorily defined word, “stillbirth” is, and yet the bill opts for the former) and upon further research the bill seemed fairly impractical as well (OB/GYNs indicated that it simply wouldn’t do much). In short, the bill had become the potential vehicle for unwarranted infringements upon a woman’s right to choose that Terri had warned she would not support. So, good to her word, she dropped it like a hot potato. But because of the rules of the State Legislature she could not remove her name as a sponsor until this session began.
So, while some may be attempting to portray this as abandonment of a cause in an election year, it’s really a quite less sensational story about a bipartisan compromise breaking down. Senator Bonoff has always been a strong supporter of pro-choice rights and made it clear that she wouldn’t support a bill that would later be used as a weapon against these rights; yet, she did want to address the very serious needs of mother’s facing the trauma of a stillbirth. It was an attempt at a tight-rope walk for a good cause, but no one should be surprised that when the other side starting shaking the rope everyone fell off.
UPDATE: After reading the comments, I just wanted to clarify a few things. I perhaps was not clear in the summary of the whole story when I said that “changes were made to subvert this assurance.” “Changes” was a poor choice of wording, but this is clarified in the full story as not meaning changes to the bill but changes in the full understanding of its purpose. Bonoff intentionally delayed the bill a session in order to be able to more fully evaluate the possibility of the bill becoming a vehicle for attacks on abortion rights and between the sessions it became increasingly clear that this posed too large a risk as she spoke more thoroughly with stakeholder groups and others. She couldn’t pull her name officially until the State Legisature was back in session. Now, there’s a legitimate critique concerning whether it was wise of Bonoff to sign on before delaying for more serious review (her response would be that her initial review illicited a neutral response from women’s groups and activists), but that’s a different issue.
The other item I want to address is something that comes up often in the comment lines of this blog: we are biased. And while we never attempt to hide our pro-dem bias, we don’t attempt to hide behind our biases either. The above is very much Senator Bonoff’s side of the story and it is intended as such; but I believe it to be a very fair and truthful telling of her side of the story. It should be noted, however, that while we are clearly biased in favor of DFLers, the above should not be construed as an indication of any preference for a particular DFLer. We are glad to come to the aid of any DFLer who legitimately deserves it and have done so for Ash Madia in the past, and would happily do so again. This post is about allowing a forum for the other side of the story, not about preferences in the 3rd CD race.
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