
- NARAL volunteers walking the marbled halls to drum up support for the bill.
The crowd and testimony at the 8:00 a.m. meeting of the Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee wasn't much different from last week's, with one striking exception: The most inflammatory pro-life rhetoric was coming from vocal Republican lawmakers in the committee, not from the hundreds anti-abortion advocates signed up to oppose the measure.
âI just want to thank the hundreds of people in opposition to this bill,â says Senator Randi Becker (R-2) in her opening remarks to those assembled. âThanks for standing up and voicing your concern for a piece of legislation you strongly oppose.â
Becker and her conservative peers delayed the public testimony by repeatedly challenging womenâs health advocates on the bill's constitutionality. They argued with that it would limit free speech*. They raised the âslippery slopeâ argumentâthat forcing centers to disclose what services they donât provide would lead to gynecologists prominently advertising that they donât perform back surgery. And throughout the hearing, Republican lawmakers attacked womenâs health advocates in general. The interruptions forced committee chair Karen Keiser (D-33) to cut testimony short after hearing from only six people on each side of the debate.
*ACLU legislative director Shankar Narayan testified in favor of the bill on behalf of the ACLU. He stressed that the legislation met the constitutional standard of protecting free speech. Last year, the ACLU testified against a similar bill aimed at regulating limited service pregnancy centersâwith a mandate that they provide "medically and scientifically accurate" information to womenâon the grounds that it didnât meet these standards.
âThis is the second year in a row Planned Parenthood has [pushed] essentially to sue pregnancy centers out of existence,â Senator Cheryl Pflug (R-5) remarked to Dr. Kate McLean, an OBGYN doctor with the University of Washington Medical Center who was testifying in support of the bill. âBut have we seen any measures from the life centers demanding that Planned Parenthood show pictures of aborted fetuses?â Pflug then name-checked a widely discredited study that claimed to show a correlation between breast cancer and abortion before asking McLean, "So do you think we should require physicians to disclose that [abortion causes breast cancer]?â
Dr. McLean, and others, ignored the baseless points raised by conservative lawmakers to patiently restate the bill's purpose: To make pregnancy centers disclose the services they do and donât provide to the women who walk through their doors, and hold them accountable when they fail. âWe have no problem with the centersâthey offer women valuable services like free diapers, pregnancy tests, counseling,â explained Elaine Rose, the CEO of Planned Parenthood Votes of Washington. âBut they deliberately locate their clinics near us and donât disclose the limits of their services. We have clients who tell us they walk in their doors mistaking their clinics for ours. Weâre trying to prevent that deception.â
Despite the sharp criticisms lobbed at the billâand its advocatesâthis morning, five of the Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee's nine members (all Democrats) are co-sponsoring the legislation. Womenâs health advocates are âcautiously confidentâ the bill will make it out of committee for a full vote in the Senate.