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For the first time in American history, the Supreme Court is poised to take away a right. A leaked draft by Justice Samuel Alito would overturn the 49-year old precedent, Roe v. Wade, and let states ban all abortions. Some states will prohibit the procedure and criminalize medical professionals performing abortions and women who sought them.
In Maine, the choice is clear.
If Gov. Janet Mills wins reelection and Democrats control the Legislature, abortion rights are safe. But if Paul LePage wins and Republican legislators gain control, they will work to limit reproductive rights.
As governor, LePage spoke to anti-choice rallies multiple times.
Moreover, the Maine GOP’s platform’s position on protecting life “from conception” is consistent with banning all abortions. This extreme stance reflects the importance of religious right voters in its coalition. That’s why the platform still opposes same-sex couples marrying ( 10 years after Maine voters backed it) and why the state convention just unanimously adopted a plank with scare language about LGBT issues through high school.
Yet LePage, who presents himself as blunt and straight-talking, is being rather vague about which abortion policies he’d sign into law — a sharp contrast to his specificity on taxes. As BDN reporter Caitlin Andrews noted, after the draft decision overturning Roe was published, his campaign put out a “roundabout statement.”
Indeed the wording of LePage’s missive was downright muddled, with mentions of the difficulties of his upbringing, federal funding for abortion, and helping seniors.
What it didn’t do is answer these questions: Does LePage support criminalizing abortion? At what point in pregnancy does he think abortion should be banned? Does he oppose exceptions for rape, incest and the life and health of the mother? Does he think fetal viability is the right time to prohibit abortions and if so, would he require women to get scans (intravaginally or otherwise) to establish fetal age?
And oddly, the official word from the Maine Republican Party is that it’s impossible to predict the pursuit of abortion policies by legislators from his party.
Jason Savage, the executive director of the Maine GOP wrote: “Surely we won’t comment on what a group of independent-minded legislators representing a diverse array of Maine communities with their own philosophies and beliefs, who have not even been elected yet, would do.”
Meanwhile Sen. Susan Collins asserts that what then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh told her is inconsistent with him voting to overturn Roe.
Except, if we are to take Collins at her word, that’s not so.
In her 2018 speech explaining her support for Kavanaugh, Collins said he’d follow long-standing precedents — unless they were “grievously wrong.”
Well, this is nearly how Justice Alito characterized Roe in the leaked opinion — as “egregiously wrong.”
As Angus King noted in 2018, “saying Roe v. Wade is a precedent” provides “no insight whatsoever into whether Judge Kavanaugh thinks it was properly decided or should be repealed or modified.”
And the Federalist Society, which vetted Trump nominees and raised money for Collins, saw Roe as a huge judicial error they wanted to overturn and used that position as a litmus test. Before his nomination to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh had an anti-chioce record.
Thus claiming Kavanuagh lied looks like a way for Collins to avoid taking responsibility.
Ultimately, we should be focused on what reproductive rights mean to women’s lives, concerns dismissed in the draft decision.
Alito pooh-poohed evidence that “women’s ability to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
Alito also brushed aside findings in previous decisions that people “organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
But the majority of Mainers who back women’s ability to choose abortion do care about such concerns and can vote accordingly in November. Despite LePage’s caginess on specifics, he’s the candidate who has opposed choice and Mills is choice’s champion.
