RICHMOND (LifeSiteNews) — Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently vetoed two pro-abortion measures that would have enabled the abortion industry to evade punishment for violating the laws of other states, but signed a third law preventing law enforcement from using electronically-stored menstrual health data in criminal investigations.
NBC Washington reports that Youngkin vetoed bills that would have blocked extraditions to other states for those who flee to Virginia to violate their home states’ pro-life laws and would have forbidden state medical authorities from disciplining Virginia doctors for helping violate other states’ laws.
America’s “cooperative extradition system could collapse if individual states were to carve out crimes for which they would not recognize codified laws because of differing political positions,” the governor said in his veto messages. He added that he did not want to “ope[n] the door to a resurgence of unsafe, risky abortions occurring outside of clinical settings.”
“Women in other states who may have been injured by abortion practitioners willing to break the laws of other places need to be sure that Virginia will not provide a hiding place for these rogue abortionists,” responded Virginia Society for Human Life president Olivia Gans Turner. “Thank you, Governor Youngkin for rejecting this dangerous bill.”
However, Youngkin also signed a bill backed by pro-abortion groups to prevent data tracked by period apps from being obtained via search warrants, subpoenas, and court orders. Most Republicans opposed the bill, and the Family Foundation of Virginia called it an “unnecessary” measure that places limits on investigations of forced abortions.
But the governor’s press secretary Christian Martinez said the bill “protects a woman’s personal health data without preventing its voluntary use in law enforcement investigations,” in her boss’s view. The bill’s leading proponent, Democrat state Sen. Barbara Favola, admitted she was unaware of an instance where police had attempted to access such data.
Youngkin has been generally with conservatives since taking office but has disappointed them on some occasions, most recently by signing a bill to codify same-sex “marriage” in March.
Democrats won back the Virginia House while retaining the state Senate last November, in a slate of elections where Republicans performed fairly strongly overall yet could not overcome redistricting and the state’s naturally left-leaning populace. Nevertheless, the outcome made it even more difficult than it already was for Republicans to pursue new conservative policies and enforce existing ones with a split legislature.
All told, 14 states currently ban all or most abortions, with available data so far indicating that now-enforceable pro-life laws could effectively wipe out an estimated 200,000 abortions a year. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
Under current Virginia law, abortion is legal for any reason in the first two trimesters, and legal in the third if two physicians say it is necessary to preserve a woman’s life or “mental or physical health.”