Washington’s Choice Activists Retrench

The pro-life lobby managed to win a victory against some late-term abortion procedures yesterday, and the newfound hubris seems to have spread all the way to the Left Coast. Their challenge to this state's sane reproductive freedom policies will never succeed, of course – this is girls’ state, and by God we’re keeping it that way. From the Seattle Times:

While Sister Park said polls show most state residents want some limitations on abortion, Washington lawmakers and voters repeatedly have been unwilling to support most attempts to restrict women's reproductive freedom. A 1998 initiative that would have created a law similar to the current federal ban was rejected by 59 percent of voters.

"I think their confidence is misplaced," said Lisa Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women's Law Center in Seattle. "They have tried and tried and failed to change our state's reproductive-choice laws."

In 1970, Washington became the first state to legalize abortion by popular vote, three years before Roe v. Wade. Voters in 1984 rejected a ban on state-funded abortions for poor women, and in 1991 approved the Reproductive Privacy Act, which preserves a woman's right to an abortion.

It’s a long shot and many years in the future, but suppose they do manage to overturn Roe v. Wade – if the nightmare scenario comes to pass, ladies, the state of Washington has your back.