Blunt, Loudon joining forces on pro-life bill
By Allen Palmeri
Staff Writer
February 8, 2005
JEFFERSON CITY – Gov. Matt Blunt, who ran for office as a pro-life Missouri Baptist, is urging lawmakers to pass Senate Bill 2, the civil liability abortion law that Sen. John Loudon, R-Ballwin and a fellow evangelical Christian, has sponsored for the last seven years.
The Loudon bill would impose civil liability for violating Missouri’s informed parental consent law that stipulates children must get parental permission before having an abortion. Another piece of the bill prohibits anyone but licensed physicians from performing abortions. A third piece to come, should it be amended onto the bill as was the case last year, would specify that a “next friend,” or adult who helps a girl petition a court, does not include another minor child or any person who has a financial interest or may potentially gain from the minor’s decision to have an abortion.
Both Blunt and Loudon are deeply concerned about the practice of Missouri minors being transported to Illinois, which does not have an informed parental consent law, so that abortions can be performed at a clinic in Granite City. Kerry Messer, lobbyist for the Missouri Baptist Convention’s (MBC) Christian Life Commission, estimates that 800 babies a year could be saved if everything in Loudon’s bill is adopted.
“This year, I ask the Missouri General Assembly to pass legislation that prohibits the transporting of a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion without parental consent,” Blunt said in his Jan. 26 State of the State Address.
Loudon said his bill is up against a handful of senators who tend to ramble on about so-called civil rights for young women. Calling them young women is wrong, the senator said. They are girls. Legally they are minors, which means that in the eyes of the state they are children, he said.
The governor is to be commended, the senator said, as he chooses to join forces with an overwhelming majority of pro-life lawmakers in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“The people who are on the wrong side of this issue have so little respect for life in general that they really kind of rant and their arguments don’t tend to be that logical,” Loudon said. “We’re going to take your daughters over to another state and have the abortions over there, and we’re going to praise the virtues of killing babies by somehow comparing it to the Underground Railroad. Their arguments are absolutely specious.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about whether we’re going to stand up and save babies, and I think we will save a lot of lives the first year we pass it.”
Messer said passing Loudon’s bill is long overdue.
“Certainly the most consensus-building issue over the pro-life debate centers around the concept of parental consent,” he said. “In Missouri, we have been blessed with lawmakers through the years who, despite a pro-abortion culture, have recognized the need to have a parental consent law. Yet there are those who would abuse the law, and we are attempting to make it more difficult for someone to abuse the system.”
The National Republican Party this year is supporting state GOP leaders like Blunt and Loudon by including among their priorities a bill that mirrors the one that Loudon has been fighting for the past seven years in Jefferson City. The Child Custody Protection Act, which carries a sentence of up to one year in prison, has made it to the U.S. Senate GOP’s Top 10 priority list, the Associated Press reported.
Missouri is one of 32 states with parental-involvement laws, the Associated Press reported.