“In the state of Connecticut a parent has to give permission to have your ears pierced if you’re a minor child, and yet a parent does not have to give permission for an abortion,” said Connecticut State Senator Michael McLachlan (picture, left). “That’s ridiculous.”
Constitutionalists agree. Yet the Nutmeg State’s Democrat-dominated General Assembly was prepared to add tanning beds to the list of activities for which parental consent is required — until McLachlan, a Republican, decided to go them one better by tacking parental consent for abortion onto the tanning bill. To the Democrats it was one thing to tell minors they couldn’t brown their own skin — an activity that various medical associations say carries a risk, but not a guarantee, of cancer — without Mom or Dad’s permission. It was quite another to tell them they couldn’t have an abortion — an activity that is certain to end in death for an innocent human being and may cause long-term damage to the erstwhile mother’s physical and mental health — absent a parent’s okay. The bill, with McLachlan’s amendment attached, was soundly defeated in the Senate.
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This was McLachlan’s second attempt to get his legislation passed. He had previously introduced it as a stand-alone bill only to see it die in committee. LifeSiteNews notes that a similar measure was introduced in the state House of Representatives in January, where it met the same fate.
None of this is particularly surprising given that Connecticut’s “abortion policy is among the most liberal in the nation,” according to LifeSiteNews, which elaborates: “The state has codified Roe vs. Wade into law, and permits third trimester abortions.”
Nevertheless, the chutzpah of the Democratic majority (22 of 36 seats in the Senate) is something to behold. According to them, McLachlan’s attempt to bring his legislation to the floor for a vote — probably the only way it was ever going to see the light of day — is responsible for the tanning bill’s defeat. The Danbury News-Times reports that Derek Slap, communications director for the Senate Democrats, declared McLachlan’s move “political grandstanding” and his common-sense argument that abortions ought to require parental consent if ear piercings and tanning beds do, “ridiculous.”
However, as McLachlan points out, the Democrats could easily have defeated his amendment and then gone on to pass the bill without it — a point even the News-Times concedes in an editorial otherwise scolding McLachlan for trying to “ram through so incendiary an issue with no time for public testimony and informed debate.”
Even that contention is disingenuous. Senate Democrats claim that if only McLachlan had introduced his amendment in a more timely fashion, they would have been happy to debate it. Their only problem, they insist, is that he chose to attach it to a bill near the end of the legislative session, a time when “no one … wanted to debate abortion,” the News-Times says. The fact of the matter is that McLachlan’s amendment had been filed in late April, giving the Senate plenty of time to debate it — if the leadership had really wanted such a debate.
“My amendment sat on the calendar for 42 days,” McLachlan said. “I never heard from one Democrat. Not one member of the Democratic Party or the legislature contacted me and said, ‘Can we talk about this?’ ”
“It was obvious that the leadership of the state Senate did not want to talk about the tanning bill because if they did all they have to do is call it. They have the votes.”
Now why might the Senate leadership not want to discuss the bill? Most likely they feared being exposed for the extremists in defense of abortion-on-demand that they really are. Had there been a debate on McLachlan’s amendment, Democrats would have been forced to go on record as favoring mandated parental consent for tanning but not for abortion — a position so indefensible that they felt it better to let the entire, very popular tanning bill die than to take the chance that the public would discover just how devoted to in-womb homicide they are. Then they blamed McLachlan for the bill’s failure.
They might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling bloggers. Unfortunately for the Left, the Old Media, which can still mostly be counted on to carry Democrats’ water and to bury inconvenient truths, is fast being eclipsed by the New Media. McLachlan’s side of the story, therefore, is now racing around the Internet, and now everyone can see just how radical are Connecticut Democrats’ views on abortion and how dirty are the tricks they will pull to ensure that nothing comes between a mother-to-be — of any age — and her “choice” to kill her unborn child.
