Minnesota Senate Votes to Allow Abortion Without Limits: ‘Most Extreme Bill in the Country’

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) is expected to sign a bill which will enshrine the “right” to an abortion without limits, after the state Senate voted 34-33 in favor of the bill on Saturday following 14 hours of debate.

“Today we are not just codifying Roe v. Wade or Doe v. Gomez as the author has indicated,” Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson (R-East Grand Forks) lamented. “We are enacting the most extreme bill in the country regarding youth sterilization, late term abortions and public viability for a vast array of new reproductive rights.”

The bill, called H.F. 1 or the Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act, was created to “cement in state law the right to access reproductive health care options including abortion, birth control, family planning help, and sterilization,” MPR News reported. The move makes Minnesota the first state to take legislative action to “protect abortion” following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, according to the report. 

The bill’s author, Sen. Jennifer McEwen (D) said the bill enshrines abortion access, no matter what future courts decide.

“The decisions of our courts, the upholding of our fundamental human rights, are only as strong as the judges that uphold them,” McEwen said. 

“We have a duty to answer the call of Minnesotans to truly protect those reproductive freedoms, to enshrine them not simply in case law, but in our statutory law,” she continued. “These are our values, this is the practice in Minnesota. This is what we believe.”

Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) blasted the legislation, saying it “puts Minnesota in the same category as just a handful of countries around the world, including North Korea and China.” 

“Minnesotans don’t support elective third-trimester abortion. They just don’t. But that’s what this extreme bill entrenches in our state law: the right to abort any baby for any reason at any time up to birth,” said MCCL Co-Executive Director Cathy Blaeser. “Under this bill, even babies who are old enough to live outside the womb and to feel excruciating pain have no protection from lethal violence. The extremism of H.F. 1 puts Minnesota in the same category as just a handful of countries around the world, including North Korea and China.”

MCCL also noted that state Democrats “thwarted” several Republican-led amendments, including “ones to protect unborn children in the third trimester (with exceptions), to protect against the barbaric procedure known as partial-birth abortion, to provide the option of anesthesia when unborn children can feel pain, and to protect women’s health by requiring that third-trimester abortions take place in a hospital.”

“The lack of parental involvement allows the most heinous of criminals — human and sex traffickers — to hide behind the doors of the unlicensed, uninspected abortion facility,” Blaeser added. “These traffickers are happily watching this legislature advance extreme, unfettered abortion bills that enable them to continue to traffic their victims.”