Pro-choice lawmakers force their views on the rest of us

Recent hearing on abortion bills shows how far apart their views are from the rest of the people of the Cowboy State

By D. Reed Eckhardt

One tweet from Casper Star-Tribune reporter Laura Hancock said it all during this week's legislative hearings on a set of bills designed to limit abortion in Wyoming.

"Most of the #pro-life people testifying are men," Ms. Hancock tartly observed as she covered the hearings live on Twitter.

Indeed. All of this is enough to make any good liberal and

progressive tired, watching these small-minded white Christian males

do anything and everything they can to score points in the battle over abortion. Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land. And efforts, like forcing women to view ultrasounds, or trying to cut off abortions after 20 weeks, or asserting they know when a fetus feels pain despite scientific consensus, have been rejected by courts across the nation. 

These Wyoming legislators know all of this, but that doesn't stop them from grandstanding and trying to force their religious views on abortion onto everyone else in the state. And if that treads on women's rights or the sanctity of the relationship between a doctor and his female patient, then that's just the way it has to be. Abortion remains the biggest burr in their fundamentalist Christian saddle -- though gay marriage and LGBT-plus rights are a close second -- and they will try anything they can dream up to get in the way of it.

It's all so silly, really. There aren't enough abortions performed in Wyoming (20 in 2013) to waste this legislative time and energy, especially in the midst of multiple fiscal crises. And there are only two doctors in the state -- in Jackson -- who do the procedure. With abortion readily available in nearby states, these bills will have no real impact on the issue.

But more importantly, the vast majority of Wyomingites don't even agree with these guys. Here's how the state's premier political scientist, Jim King of the University of Wyoming, put it in a column at WyoFile:

"The general numbers have been fairly consistent over the years: around 10 percent (of Wyoming residents) oppose abortion altogether; 35 percent support abortion in cases of rape or incest; 15 percent support abortion for other “clearly established” reasons, and 40 percent accept abortion as a matter of personal choice. This distribution of opinion actually shows Wyoming’s population to be slightly more liberal on the abortion issue than the U.S. population as a whole." (The italics are mine.)

This is why, in the end, bills such as those that passed out of committee this week http://tinyurl.com/z964q7h should die the same death as the dozens that have come before. They not only force a religious belief on those of us who see things differently, but they are not even representative of what this state stands for. Indeed, while the idea that Wyomingites champion "live and let live" is mostly a myth, in this case, it actually holds true. Most people in Wyoming recognize that abortion is a hard choice made by women, their families, and their doctors. Meddling, haughty white male legislators are rightly not included in that discussion.

One has to wonder what the sponsors of these bills were doing while thousands of the state's women (and their supporters ) were marching, both at home and in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21. For the record, gentlemen, they were expressing their fears at the Women's Marches that those in power would try to rob them of their hard-earned rights. One wonders where they got that idea.

D. Reed Eckhardt is the former executive editor of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.