The Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature will vote Tuesday to try to override the governor’s veto on a 12 week abortion bana vote that will test the strength of the party’s new supermajority in the legislature.
The state Senate will reconsider the vetoed bill in its tuesday session. If the effort is approved by the Senate, the House vote to complete the annulment Tuesday night, according to the House Speaker’s chief of staff.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation Saturday, keeping abortion legal in the state for up to 20 weeks. But Tim Moore, the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, swore that Cooper’s veto will be «promptly overridden.»
Last month, Tricia Cotham joined the Republican Party after campaigning for and winning her House seat as a Democrat, giving Republicans a veto-proof majority. But if all Democrats vote against the bill, as they are expected to do, the decision to override the governor’s veto could come down to a single Republican vote.
Cooper spent the past week locked in a lobbying campaign to encourage Republican lawmakers to break with his party and oppose the bill. in a video posted online, he named four Republican lawmakers who he said made campaign promises to protect abortion access.
«They say this is a reasonable 12-week ban,» Cooper said. «It is not. The fine print requirements and restrictions will close clinics and make abortion unavailable to many women at any time, causing despair and death.»
The four lawmakers did not immediately respond to questions about whether they would vote to override the veto.
The 12-week abortion ban is a less restrictive threshold than other conservative legislatures have implemented. It includes exceptions for rape or incest and a «life-limiting abnormality» in the fetus.
But opponents of the bill say it would effectively restrict access to abortion in a state that has become a haven for women seeking the procedure. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last June that struck down Roe v. Wade, North Carolina saw a significant increase in the number of abortions performed as women from neighboring states flocked to North Carolina to circumvent strict abortion bans, according to figures compiled by the nonprofit Society for Family Planning.
The bill would impose new restrictions on access to abortion. It would require women to have an in-person medical visit at least 72 hours before undergoing a surgical abortion. Doctors should also make a real-time view of the fetus available to women and allow women seeking an abortion to hear their fetus’s heartbeat.