North Carolina Legislature Fails to Overturn Governor’s Veto of Anti-Abortion Bill

In a rare defeat for anti-abortion activists in the South, Republicans in North Carolina failed Wednesday to overturn a veto of a bill that would have made it a crime to not treat “any infant born alive after an abortion.”

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, rejected the bill days after it passed both Republican-held chambers of the state legislature in April, noting then that the measure was an “unnecessary interference between doctors and their patients” and would have criminalized a “practice that simply does not exist.”

Doctors are already held to a 2002 federal law that protects fetuses that survive abortions. In a statement Wednesday, Cooper reiterated his position that the bill, the so-called Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act, was redundant.

“It’s important to protect the lives of all children, and laws already exist to protect newborn babies,” Cooper said. “Instead of passing unnecessary legislation for political purposes, we need to move on from divisive social issues and focus on the needs of North Carolina families: education, health care and good-paying jobs.”

The override effort in the North Carolina House failed after a 67-53 vote, just short of the three-fifths majority needed to overturn Cooper’s veto. The state Senate voted in April to override the governor.

In statehouses across the country this year, a number of other Republican-dominated states have passed anti-abortion measures, including several that would ban the procedure once health care providers were able to detect the pulsing of what would become a fetus’s heart, which can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy. Alabama approved a law last month that would forbid nearly all abortions in the state.

The failure on Wednesday to overturn Cooper’s veto was among the most dramatic consequences of Democratic legislative victories in North Carolina last November, which broke Republican supermajorities in both chambers and made it easier for Cooper’s vetoes to survive. Those wins were also a subtle but important shift in the balance of power favoring Cooper, whose November 2016 victory was the first crack in the Republican Party’s near-total control of state politics.

Those who supported Senate Bill 359 said the measure was an important check on potential infanticide. The legislation stated that “if an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person” and entitled to protection under North Carolina law. Penalties for not providing care after a failed abortion would have included a fine of up to $250,000 and potential prosecution under the state’s murder statutes.

The office of House Speaker Tim Moore said in a statement issued Wednesday that the failed override effort was the “final vote” on the matter. Moore added that Democrats had “successfully prevented a duty of care for all living, breathing North Carolinians born alive in the state.”

Democrats, in return, accused Moore of unsavory hardball tactics, accusing him of scheduling the vote at a time when one Democratic lawmaker was recovering from a mastectomy.

North Carolina’s bill was similar to a federal measure that Democrats blocked in the U.S. Senate this year. Medical professionals at the time said that the federal bill would have led to further complications, including some in which the lives of both the mother and fetus were at stake.