Arizona Catholic Conference hopeful about legislative session
By Joyce Coronel | March 5, 2009 | The Catholic Sun
Despite the deepening recession, the Arizona Catholic Conference is advocating legislation that is a bright spot in an otherwise troublesome political season.
Ron Johnson, executive director of the conference, said the Arizona House of Representatives’ majority program released nine non-budget-related bills in mid-February.
The Catholic conference supported three of the nine: the partial-birth abortion statewide ban (HB 2400), making the corporate scholarship tax credit permanent (HB 2288) and streamlining the charitable organizations’ tax credit (HB 2288), according to Johnson.
He also referred to HB 2564, also known as the Abortion Consent Act, as the most significant pro-life legislation he’s seen in Arizona in decades.
The Feb. 25 hearing on the bill before the House’s health and human services’ committee coincided with Ash Wednesday.
“It wasn’t planned that way, but it’s funny how these things work out,” Johnson said.
The House’s health and human services’ committee held a hearing on the bill Feb. 25. It passed 5-0 after committee Democrats boycotted the meeting and subsequent vote.
He described the Abortion Consent Act as a measure that “will protect women, parents, children and the civil rights of health care providers. The bill is significant because it takes some of these measures passed by the legislature previously but vetoed by Gov. Janet Napolitano.”
Johnson added that the measure contains “common sense, middle-of-the-road proposals that most Arizonans would agree with.”
The bill includes provisions for informed consent and a 24-hour waiting period before obtaining an abortion.
“Typically, any other non-emergency surgery is not done in less than 24 hours,” Johnson said.
The measure also tightens up regulations concerning parental consent for a minor seeking an abortion.
“It provides for notarized signatures of parents, it codifies meaningful judicial bypass procedures, and it ensures that non-doctors will not perform surgical abortion as was being done in Tucson at Planned Parenthood,” Johnson said.
The bill also deals with health care providers.
“We’re updating conscience statutes to make sure that doctors, nurses, hospitals — all health care professionals including hospitals and pharmacists — do not have to take part in any way with regard to abortions or abortifacients,” Johnson said. “Pharmacists will not have to dispense Plan B.”
Pro-lifers are hopeful that the bills will be passed and signed into law, especially since the new governor, Jan Brewer, has a pro-life voting record.
Gov. Brewer, the former Secretary of State who assumed the office of governor when Gov. Janet Napolitano was appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, is a former state legislator who supported pro-life legislation during her tenure.
Meanwhile, the budget continues to dominate the legislative session as state agencies grapple with budget cuts. Lawmakers are now eyeing the roughly $4 billion that may be available from the federal stimulus package to help deal with the economic downturn.
