California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday unveiled a multistate ad campaign to combat proposals in several Republican-controlled states that he said aim to ban out-of-state travel for abortions and related medications.
The six-figure ad campaign and an online petition will launch Monday, starting with a television ad targeting a bill being considered in Tennessee. There, eight Republican state lawmakers are lead cosponsors of bills that would create a felony “abortion trafficking,” making it a crime for adults to help minors obtain an abortion or medications to terminate premature pregnancies without the consent of the parents. parents or legal guardians. The bills would also allow civil lawsuits for the “wrongful death of a fetus that was aborted.”
Similar legislation is pending in several states that have banned or strictly restricted abortion, including Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama. Newsom plans to take them on with RightToTravel.org, a national political action committee-funded effort he launched last spring with $10 million of his state campaign funds. He has said the effort, called the “Campaign for Democracy,” aims to boost Democrats and counter a radically conservative Republican agenda.
“We cannot allow Trump Republicans to hold women hostage,” Newsom said in a news release announcing the campaign. “These abortion travel bans are a new, sick and twisted attempt by the far right to control women and take away their freedom. We have to fight back.”
A key sponsor of one of the Tennessee bills, Republican state Rep. Jason Zachary, has said his intention is to protect the rights of parents to decide on medical procedures involving their children. He noted that children are not allowed to administer aspirin or COVID-19 vaccines without parental consent.
“This bill is intended to protect the rights of parents … to ensure that no adult takes advantage of a vulnerable minor who may be pregnant,” Zachary said at a hearing last week.
Zachary also said the bill does not seek to restrict interstate travel, an area of federal jurisdiction that he said Tennessee lawmakers cannot control, but only the transportation of minors within Tennessee.
Tennessee is among states that have banned abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with few exceptions, meaning most pregnant people seeking an abortion have few options within the state.
Opponents of the “abortion trafficking” bill say the intent is to cut off the ability to seek abortions in states where abortion rights are protected, and one of Zachary’s Republican colleagues reiterated that understanding at the hearing.
Zachary faced critical questions from Democratic lawmakers, who noted that the adults a young person trusts most are sometimes not their parents, but their grandparents or other relatives, teachers, nurses or ministers, who would be subject to felony charges for try to help them with an unwanted situation. the pregnancy.
Newsom’s new ad, titled “Hostage,” shows a tearful young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed, with a “sexual assault evidence collection kit” on a nearby table. She screams for help.
“Trump Republicans want to criminalize young women who travel to get the reproductive care they need,” the narrator says. “Don’t let them take Tennessee women hostage.”