North Carolina Governor Vows to Veto 12-Week Abortion Ban, Pleads with Republicans Not to Override It

Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina said Sunday that the state’s newly-passed 12-week abortion ban would endanger the access of millions of residents to the medical procedure and urged Republican legislators to resist overriding the veto he promised to sign.

“It will effectively ban many abortions altogether, because of the obstacles that they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors,” Cooper told Face the Nation on Sunday.

“They’ve [Republicans] dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it’s really not,” the governor added. “They ran through a bill in 48 hours with no public input, with no amendments, that drastically reduces access to reproductive freedom for women.”

On Thursday, the Republican-controlled Senate passed new restrictions capping abortions at 12 weeks, down from the previous limitation of 20 weeks. Shouts of “Abortion rights now!” rang from the gallery after the Senate voted on Bill 20, also known as the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act,” which passed along party lines.

“We are grateful more babies will be protected,” Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the NC Values Coalition, told the New York Times following the vote. The bill “marks the end of North Carolina as a destination for abortion and is a historic step forward for unborn babies and their mothers.”

State Democrats recently suffered a major loss when Representative Tricia Cotham decided to cross party lines and join Republicans in early April.

“The modern-day Democratic Party has become unrecognizable to me and to so many others throughout this state and this country,” Cotham said during a recent press conference. “The party wants to villainize anyone who has free thought, free judgment, has solutions,” she said. “If you don’t do exactly what the Democrats want you to do, they will try to bully you. They will try to cast you aside.”

The move handed Republicans a supermajority in the house, alongside its dominance in the state senate, giving the party the power to override the governor’s veto.

Cooper has insisted that he will fight to overturn the legislation by actively calling on a handful of Republicans to throw their support behind him to deprive the party of its supermajority.

“We only need one Republican to keep a promise,” Cooper said during the Sunday interview.

“At least four Republican legislators made promises to their constituents during this campaign that they were going to protect women’s reproductive freedom. They only have a supermajority by one vote in the Senate, and one vote in the House. And we’ve seen Republicans across the country step up. We saw them step up in South Carolina, we saw them step up in Nebraska, because they know that people don’t want abortion bans.”

Cooper specifically named Cotham, along with three other Republican lawmakers, in a video address released last Thursday in a bid to undermine support for the bill and dismantle its veto-proof supermajority.

“We only need one Republican in either the House or Senate to help sustain the veto of this dangerous abortion ban. Ted Davis, Michael Lee, John Bradford, and Tricia Cotham promised to protect women’s reproductive freedom. There’s still time for them to keep their promises,” the governor tweeted following the news Thursday night.

The bill will go into effect July 1 if Cooper fails to find a willing Republican.