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The Crucial Role of NRLC’s State Legislative Department

Jul 16, 2013

By Dave Andrusko

Editor’s note. Access any information outlet that touches on abortion and you will read just how aggressive the Movement has been this legislative cycle. Most of the proposals for state laws are shaped by National Right to Life’s Department of State Legislation. This article from the March 15, 1999, edition of National Right to Life News is today’s entry in the year-long “Roe at 40” series in which we are bringing just a sampling of the best articles that have appeared in NRL News going back to 1973!

2013stopfrontListen to a very animated Mary Spaulding Balch, JD, for just two minutes and you can’t help but come away excited — very excited — about the headway pro-lifers are making in state legislature after state legislature.

While there a number of explanations for the steady progress, Balch, director of NRLC’s State Legislative Department, said they all come down to the conclusion she has come to accept as gospel: “Once legislators — even self-described ‘pro-choicers’ — start thinking, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll begin to come our way.”

And that is NRLC’s highly effective four-member State Legislative Department’s specialty: getting legislators out of the usual ruts so that they can see abortion for the inexcusable evil that it is. If the worried comments of leading pro-abortion organizations are any indication, Mary Balch, Jim Gehrke, Ann Brennan, and Ingrid Walker are having a major impact.

Key Role

Just listen to the other side.

On January 22, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) issued the eighth edition of Who Decides? A State-by-State Review of Abortion and Reproductive Rights. As one gauge of the lopsided legislative impact in 1998, the report says that “states enacted 62 new anti-choice [sic] and 22 pro-choice laws in 1998.”

Who Decides? ranks the states “A” through “F.” NARAL assigned the 50 states an average score of 69% — “a D+, reflecting the variety and number of laws designed to hinder access to abortion.” Indeed, “Americans may believe that Roe safeguards women’s right to choose,” the report intones, “but Who Decides? reveals that the landmark decision has been severely compromised in many jurisdictions” (see story, page 8).

Begun in 1989

Chances are very good that when you read about passage of a piece of pro-life legislation, Balch and her associates had played a crucial role both in the measure’s design and in assisting pro-life lobbyists to shepherd the law through the legislative minefield.

Balch, a lawyer as are Gehrke and Brennan, became director of NRLC’s State Legislative Department in 1994, after having served as associate director from its inception in 1989.

She explained that from January to June — the time period of heaviest state legislative activity — her department is deeply involved in virtually non-stop phone conversations with pro-life lobbyists as they seek advice how best to pass pro-life legislation and fend off pro-abortion proposals. The remainder of the year is just as important as the State Legislative Department is assembling fact sheets, memoranda of law, and model legislation.

“The states tell us these are invaluable resources,” Balch said. Assembled in well-organized, thick binders, the great advantage for pro-life forces in the state legislatures is that they bring together in one convenient place almost everything needed to initiate, debate, and pass legislation.

“So often pro-abortionists just utter out-and-out falsehoods,” she said. “There is documentation to disprove every distortion they utter and that’s what we provide in the binders.”

The skill of the lobbyists from NRLC’s state affiliates, Balch said, has grown steadily. This is extremely important because the structure of the legislative process means that only a small percentage of laws introduced actually pass. If lobbyists are not top flight, their legislation goes nowhere.

“I really am impressed with our state lobbyists, particularly how they circumvent hostile committees and [when they aren’t able to] work every angle to get pro-life legislation directly to the floor,” she said.

Beyond the growing talent pool of sophisticated pro-life lobbyists (many of whom were trained by NRLC’s State Legislative Department), the cause of unborn babies is benefiting from the election of more pro-life state legislators and their gradual ascension into positions of seniority.

“Part of that is because more pro-lifers have entered the political arena,” Balch said, “and part of it is that pro-lifers have worked hard to protect legislators who, once elected, are unafraid to stand up for what they believe in.” As a result a myth is finally dying: that to be a pro-lifer endangers a legislator’s political future.

Asked by NRL News to characterize the record of recent legislative efforts, Balch said, “I am very satisfied. We did well and are getting closer in a number of states.”

Balch noted that on the one hand virtually every piece of successful pro-life legislation is taken to court, even in instances where the United States Supreme Court has already spoken definitively. On the other hand, once the High Court does uphold a pro-life law it stirs a resurgence of grassroots energy.

“Until the Court upheld parental notification in the 1990 “Hodgson” case, there had been a lull,” she said, with the number of parental involvement laws remaining unchanged at 15.

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“But following Hodgson, we’ve had about one new state per year passing such laws,” Balch said. In the past two years, the Supreme Court has upheld Montana’s law and Virginia’s law. As a result, “I’ve been getting calls from other states ready to pass similar legislation.”

It is this steady but quiet run of victories that goes unnoticed by most newspapers, she said.

Balch has often said that the pro-abortion case is built on sand — lies and deception — and the pro-life position on solid rock — truth and compassion. She firmly believes the truth will ultimately carry the day.

That is partly because the processes that make it happen — culminating in the gradual retirement of entrenched pro-abortion committee chairs, and the gradual accumulation of seniority by younger pro-lifers — are taking place largely unnoticed around the nation.

“But NARAL knows,” Balch explained.

Is the pro-life movement, legislatively, heading in the right direction? Absolutely, Balch believes.

“We just have to make sure that we stay the course.”

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Categories: NRLC