5 days ago
Day: Branches aligned on reproductive rights stance
BOSTON (SHNS) – The House and Senate are 'aligned' on the need to resist attempts by Republicans in Washington, D.C. and other states to restrict reproductive and transgender care here despite any legislative process hiccups along the way, a top House Democrat said Tuesday.
Representatives got a chance to weigh in publicly on legislation that Senate Democrats deemed a top priority weeks ago when a measure (S 2522) updating the 2022 shield law emerged at a Judiciary Committee hearing.
Rep. Michael Day, the panel's co-chair, used the opportunity both to point out the less typical path the bill is taking as well as to insist there's agreement between House and Senate Democrats on the substance at play.
'While others and we may have some concern about the process by which this bill got here, that, to me, is really more about internal relationships between the chambers and not about the big picture this bill is,' Day replied to testimony by bill author Sen. Cindy Friedman. 'I think you did a good job of touching upon what the big picture is on this bill: women, women's health and gender-affirming care are under attack from other states and certainly being threatened by the current administration in Washington, D.C.'
'We in Massachusetts, certainly, I think, are aligned between the chambers here to push back on the idea that women shouldn't be able to make decisions about their own bodies,' he added.
The House and Senate initially disagreed on whether the Judiciary Committee or the Health Care Financing Committee, co-chaired by Friedman, should review the measure first.
On Thursday, the Senate acquiesced and allowed the proposal to go to the Judiciary Committee. Day said the arrival of the bill 'caught us on short notice' and that senators on the panel added it to the Tuesday hearing agenda 'within an hour.'
'I say that because I don't know that the committee members, on the House side at least, had an adequate chance to really get into this bill as we did with the other bills that had been noticed,' he said of the 16-page proposal.
Much of the substance of the bill already got aired last week — albeit with no representatives directly involved — at a hearing held by the Senate Committee on Steering and Policy. Senate President Karen Spilka tasked that Friedman-chaired panel, which had not held a public hearing in years, with leading her chamber's response to the Trump administration.
At both hearings, officials in Attorney General Andrea Campbell's office as well as reproductive and transgender health care advocates called on lawmakers to expand on a 2022 law designed to shield those services from out-of-state legal action.
Top Senate Democrats including Spilka announced their support for the bill in mid-April when it was first filed.
The proposal would restrict Massachusetts agencies from cooperating with or providing information for federal or out-of-state investigations, require acute care hospitals to provide abortion services when necessary to address a patient's emergency medical condition, and prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against nonprofits that offer reproductive health and transgender care.
One section would require prescription drug labels for reproductive and transgender care to omit the name of the individual prescribing physician and instead list only the broader health care practice.
Supporters pointed to the case of Dr. Maggie Carpenter, a New York doctor facing a felony charge in Louisiana and a penalty in Texas for prescribing medication abortion, as a reason for the proposed change.
Allyson Slater, director of the reproductive justice unit in Attorney General Andrea Campbell's office, said the language was 'designed to protect the provider who may be mailing medication out of state.'
'We know that these providers are providing care across state lines, sometimes into hostile states, and certainly that puts them at great risk if their personal information is easily available and being sent across those state lines,' Slater said.
Day rattled off other reforms Beacon Hill has embraced, including a 2017 law increasing access to birth control, the 2020 ROE Act and the 2022 shield law, the latter of which he called a 'national standard for other states.'
He also noted that the House-approved fiscal year 2026 state budget included $2 million for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.
'I know the Senate did not include that proposal. I'm very hopeful that they will agree to do so in the conference committee and in the final budget that we send to Governor Healey,' Day said. 'The essence, I think, is that we don't want to make women's health a bargaining chip in budget discussions. The challenges we're facing from the federal government, I think, are too important for that, and certainly too important for inter-chamber squabbles.'
Friedman told the Judiciary Committee 'there's simply no time to wait based on the swift and unpredictable actions of the Trump administration.'
'I've always felt like both houses have been in sync with this issue,' she said. 'There was nothing in this that putting this forward this quickly was anything except about an incredible sense of urgency and getting it in front of you all so that we could move this along.'
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