FamilyFoundationBlog.com

It’s never easy to negotiate a straight road through the General Assembly. This year, even as many issues long ago were decided, a stunning development has presented us a monumental last minute vote — but even that’s been pushed back a day. 

The Virginia Senate, after some debate today, put off until tomorrow a vote on the pro-life House amendment to SB 924. The bill, patroned by Senator Ryan McDougle (R-4, Mechanicsville), directs the Board of Health to create regulations regarding hospitals, nursing homes, and certified nursing facilities. However, Delegate Kathy Byron’s (R-22, Lynchburg) floor amendment (read here) Monday tacked on abortion centers to the types of facilities to come under these regulations. Once the House of Delegates approved the amendment and then the bill, it moved back to the Senate which will have to approve or reject the amendment and the bill.

In effect, the new version of bill requires the Board of Health to create abortion center safety regulations — an initiative The Family Foundation has pushed for more than a decade. But pro-abortion lawmakers successfully negotiated a one-day delay in the vote, presumably to pressure two pro-life Democrats. The Washington Post’s Virginia Politics blog reported today that Democrat Senators Chuck Colgan (D-29, Manassas) and Phil Puckett (D-38, Tazewell) have committed to support the amendment. We’re hopeful one more may come around as well. If the 18 Republican senators vote as a block, the addition of Senators Colgan and Puckett would result in a 20-20 tie, in which case Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling would cast the deciding vote. A pro-life advocate during his time in the legislature, Lieutenant Governor Bolling is likely to support the amendment.

During today’s debate, opponents inaccurately portrayed the bill as forcing abortion centers to become hospitals with identical regulations. In fact, the bill as amended simply states that abortion centers are a type of hospital and that the Board of Health would have to promulgate regulations for this new classification of hospital, just as there are regulations for ambulatory surgery centers.
 
It is likely that tomorrow pro-abortion legislators will pull out every procedural move in the book in an attempt to derail this monumental win for the pro-life movement. Simply put, any attempt to monkey with the process (for example, attempting re-refer to committee or declaring the amendment not germane) will be seen as a deliberate attempt to prevent passage of the amendment and in effect the same as a vote against the amendment. After years of waiting for this day, pro-life advocates deserve an up or down vote on abortion center safety on the Senate floor.

Pressure and parliamentary tricks. That’s what the pro-abortion movement has come down to. Will it be enough to overcome what is right and the will of the people?
 
Thank you to those who have already contacted their Senators to support  this critical amendment. For those of you who have not yet done so, we urge you to do so immediately and affect this historic and monumental opportunity. 

Contact your senator by e-mail.

Contact your senator by phone.

Learn who your senator is.

Former Charlottesville Daily Progress reporter Bob Gibson refers to much of what passes as fact in our world today as “designer information.” There’s no doubt that politicians, the media and groups on both sides of issues play fast and lose with the facts. Last night we witnessed some of that on the floor of the Virginia Senate surrounding debate over the abortion funding amendment. Some of the claims made were, to be polite, creative.

Which brings us to the current leader of the free world (yeah, I know, but stick with me here) and his own personal PR firm, the Mainstream Media. President Obama is clearly one who can craft a message out of just about anything and make it fit his agenda, and there are few in the MSM willing to call him out on it and risk being thrown out of the press pool. The White House is the Madison Avenue of “designer information.”

Case in point was last week’s announcement by the White House that same-sex partners could no longer be denied visitation rights at the nation’s hospitals. Homosexual rights groups rejoiced at this monumental “civil rights” moment (never mind they already could do this). In fact, in Virginia, the General Assembly passed useless legislation a few years ago saying this very thing. No one objected because it wasn’t necessary. Anyway, the media said the president had been emotionally touched by a story out of Florida where a lesbian had sued a hospital over not being able to visit her partner. The story was oft repeated, and has been for a while.

Except it isn’t entirely accurate.

The Family Research Council reports the details here. According to the hospital:

The most important piece of information to consider from our side of this story is that the charge nurse on duty the night Ms. Pond was in our care — and the person who made all visitation access decisions that evening — is herself a lesbian with a life partner. In addition, numerous members of the medical team working in our trauma unit are openly homosexual. We can assure you that Ms. Langbehn was not treated differently because of her sexual orientation.

Oops. But then again, don’t count on too many Americans learning of this tiny little discrepancy between fact and messaging.