Terry McAuliffe also falsely claimed he ‘never advocated changing’ Virginia’s statute on late-term abortion.
The Democratic gubernatorial candidate also falsely claimed he ‘never advocated changing’ Virginia’s statute on late-term abortion.
D emocratic candidate Terry McAuliffe claimed at Tuesday night’s Virginia gubernatorial debate that he supports the state’s abortion laws “that are on the books today,” but he repeatedly refused to say following the debate whether he would change Virginia’s law on taxpayer funding of elective abortions.
“I’m not gonna talk about hypothetical bills,” McAuliffe said at a post-debate press conference when National Review asked him what he’d do if the Virginia legislature passed a bill providing taxpayer funding for all legal abortions for Medicaid recipients in Virginia.
McAuliffe has spent much of the campaign talking about hypothetical bills he would or would not sign. For example, McAuliffe said Tuesday night that — contrary to a pledge his campaign made in April — he would not sign a bill ending “qualified immunity” for police officers.
But McAuliffe adamantly refused to say one way or the other what he’d do as governor on the issue of taxpayer funding of abortion. “I’m not going to do hypothetical bills today,” McAuliffe said when asked why he couldn’t answer the question.
Only 16 states in the country use their own tax dollars to fund elective abortion in their Medicaid programs; Virginia and other states prohibit funding of abortion except in rare circumstances allowed by the federal Hyde amendment.
Several studies show that the Hyde amendment saves tens of thousands of human lives from abortion each year: “According to one study by the Guttmacher Institute, when states use their own tax dollars to fund abortions for Medicaid recipients, the abortion rate among women on Medicaid was nearly four times the abortion rate among women who are not on Medicaid. In states that do not fund abortion, the abortion rate among women on Medicaid was 1.6 times the rate among women not on Medicaid.”
At the post-debate press conference, McAuliffe also falsely claimed he has “never advocated changing” Virginia’s statute on late-term abortions.
“I support — let me make this clear — the laws that are on the books today in Virginia, which, as you know, a woman through [sic] the second trimester and then the health of the mother after that. That’s the law in Virginia,” McAuliffe said. “I’ve never advocated changing that, ever.”
As Politifact reported in 2019, McAuliffe originally opposed a radical abortion bill sponsored by Democratic delegate Kathy Tran that would allow abortion in the last week of pregnancy if a single doctor said it was necessary to protect mental health.
But McAuliffe flipped a couple months later and said he would have let Tran’s bill become law. “I would not have vetoed the bill,” McAuliffe said in a radio interview. In Virginia, a bill passed by the legislature automatically becomes law if the governor does not formally issue a veto. McAuliffe also indicated at the first gubernatorial debate that he would sign Tran’s bill.
“So, how late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?” Virginia delegate Todd Gilbert asked Delegate Kathy Tran at a hearing in 2019. “I’m talking about mental health.”
“I mean, through the third trimester. The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks,” Tran replied.
As David French wrote in 2019:
The [Kathy Tran] bill reduces the number of doctors required to certify the alleged medical need for an abortion from three to one, and — critically — eliminates any required showing of severity before the doctor and mother can determine that the birth would impair her physical or mental health. Under the bill’s actual text, virtually any claim of impairment would suffice to meet the act’s requirements. Anxiety? Depression? The conventional physical challenges of post-partum recovery? Any of those things could justify taking the life of a fully formed, completely viable, living infant.
That’s infanticide. That’s barbarism.
In 2020, Tran’s bill didn’t pass the legislature, but Virginia’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam and the Democratic legislature changed the law on abortion to eliminate a 24-hour waiting period, lower health and safety standards at abortion facilities, and eliminate the state’s requirement that only doctors may perform abortions.
In 2021, Northam and the Democratic legislature changed the law to allow taxpayer-subsidized Obamacare plans to cover elective abortions.
But McAuliffe seems determined to mislead Virginia voters about whether he supports making further changes to the law on abortion if he wins in November.
When I arrived in the press room before Tuesday night’s debate, two former Republicans acting as McAuliffe campaign surrogates, David Ramadan and William Kristol, were briefing the press about why they support McAuliffe. One reporter asked Kristol, my friend and former boss at The Weekly Standard, what he would say to pro-life voters. Kristol replied: “People should vote their conscience, and they should vote for the person they agree with. I try always to respect other people’s votes. I would say, personally, abortion law in Virginia is not going to change.”
“Do we think Glenn Youngkin, if he were to get elected, would be some pro-life crusader?” he added. “I don’t think it’s going to matter much in terms of the actual legislation that is passed here.”
Whether abortion law in Virginia will change again may depend on the results of state senate elections that don’t occur again until 2023. Youngkin has pledged to sign a bill that would protect the lives of unborn children capable of feeling pain, but there’s no chance the state senate, which Democrats control 21-19, would bring that pro-life bill to the floor next year.
It’s unclear what the current Democratic legislature would do on abortion if McAuliffe wins in November. While McAuliffe refuses to say whether he’d sign a bill funding all abortions for Medicaid recipients, he is pushing for a radical amendment that would enshrine a right to abortion in the Virginia state constitution. That amendment would very likely accomplish what Tran’s bill sought to accomplish, require state-funding of all Medicaid abortions, and foreclose the possibility of enacting laws protecting the lives of babies in the womb from lethal violence. The governor plays no formal role in adding an amendment to the state constitution: The General Assembly must pass an amendment twice with an intervening election between both votes, and then the amendment is put on the ballot for voters to approve.
No state in the nation has a constitutional amendment enshrining a right to abortion, but Vermont could be the first state to enact one in 2022.