DENVER, May 24, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – America’s largest abortion chain helped give the Colorado Secretary of State’s office pointers on the final language in its statement announcing a boycott of state bureaucrats traveling to Alabama, emails obtained by local media reveal.
Earlier this month, Alabama enacted the Alabama Human Life Protection Act, which criminalizes abortion for any reason other than to “avert (a mother’s) death or to avert serious risk of substantial physical impairment of a major bodily function,” or “if a second physician who is licensed in Alabama as a psychiatrist” diagnoses a “serious mental illness” with a “reasonable medical judgment that she will engage in conduct that could result in her death or the death of her unborn child.”
The law been met with outrage and protests from the abortion lobby and its allies in politics and media, such as Colorado’s Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who announced that staffers in her office will be barred from taking work-related trips to Alabama while the abortion ban is in effect.
“Until the laws of Alabama allow for safe and legal access to health care for women, we call on the Election Center to move the location of its training from Alabama,” Griswold declared. “I will not authorize the spending of state resources on travel to Alabama for this training or any other purpose. This is one action that I can take in response to this egregious law against women.”
This week, NBC affiliate 9News published emails between Griswold’s office and Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) regarding potential feedback and revisions on the planned announcement.
“LMK [let me know] thoughts/edits. If you could turn around as quickly as possible that would be great because SOS [secretary of state] wants to move fast,” Griswold communications director Serena Woods wrote to PPRM communications vice president Whitney Phillips and political director Jack Teter.
“I believe our CEO is going to call the Secretary and share some additional feedback,” Phillips replied. “In the meantime, my feedback on the media release is attached. It feels to me the Election Center part is a little inside baseball for most folks and the travel authorization is a little more digestible for the mainstream/media.” Phillips also suggested not using any “right to choose/pro-life/pro-choice language,” as “polling indicates it is further polarizing and turns folks off.”
Incorporating the abortion giant’s advice, the final statement omitted the phrase “right to choose” as well as a sentence deemed unnecessary.
“In general, when any of our public officials reach out on input on women's health issues, we provide opinion and general thoughts,” Phillips told 9News in defense of providing the edits. “PP provides messaging guidance around abortion. That is our job as reproductive health experts.”
Others expressed reservations about a political interest group helping shape government statements.
“Fundamentally, people expect that office in particular to be non-partisan, and she ran on a platform that she was going to be non-partisan,” said former Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert, who served under Griswold’s Republican predecessor Wayne Williams. “And the reason it's so important is because they regulate elections. They regulate campaign finance. They regulate lobbyists, and now they're working directly and taking orders, basically, from a lobbyist group.
“Whether you agree with Planned Parenthood's platform or not, I think we can all agree that we should not have our policies in the state dictated to us by special interest groups and lobbying organizations,” she continued. “I don't think it's appropriate. I don't think it's ethical. I think it's wrong.”
Pro-lifers hope that between the Alabama law and the wave of similarly-aggressive heartbeat measures in other states, there are enough new laws directly challenging Roe v. Wade’s “viability” threshold to eventually reach the US Supreme Court, which they hope will finally overturn the 1973 ruling and allow states (as well as Congress) to decide their own abortion laws.