"Face the Nation" on May 7, 2023
Interview
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Good morning, Margaret.
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They've dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it's really not. They rammed through a bill in 48 hours with no public input, with no amendments, that drastically reduces access to reproductive freedom for women. It will effectively ban many abortions altogether because of the obstacles that they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors. They have tried to disguise the disastrous impacts of this bill, but we're going to expose them.
This bill has nothing to do with making women safer and everything to do with banning abortions.
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You only need --
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Go ahead.
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For sure. And also, in fact, for medication abortion, the bill specifically limits it to 10 weeks. And with these additional requirements of three in-person visits that doctors have said are medically unnecessary, with more requirements put on clinics that are already strained with four-week backlogs of people, North Carolina has become an access point in the southeast.
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And what this legislation is going to do is going to prevent many women from getting abortions at any time during their pregnancy because of the obstructions that they have put here. Many of these clinics are working very hard to treat women and now they're going to have many new medically unnecessary requirements that I think many of them are going to have to close.
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Well, first, we only need one Republican to keep a promise, at least four Republican legislators made promise that their constituents during this campaign that they were going to protect women's reproductive freedom. They only have a super majority by one vote in the Senate and one vote in the House. And we've seen Republicans across the country step up. We saw them step up in South Carolina. We saw them step up in Nebraska, because they know that people don't want abortion bans. And that's what this bill is. The more people find out about it --
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Well, they don't have to answer to me, they have to answer to their constituents. So what I'm doing is trying to educate the public about the disaster that this bill is. And I'm going to go into their districts, I'm going to go into their districts this week, we're going to have forums with doctors and advocates and women who care deeply about the restrictions in this legislation, and we're going to educate the public.
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Look, they kept this bill under lock and key. They wouldn't let their own members take a copy out. The public only saw it for 48 hours.
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It's 46 pages long.
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And it creates so many problems for women and clinics that it's going to operate as an effective ban. And we're not going to - we're not going to let them disguise this thing as something reasonable when it's not.
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If it were - if it were 12 weeks, Margaret, but it's not. It's not a 12-week ban.
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No, we do not.
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So, the problem is, we have super gerrymandered districts and the Democrats were in the super minority. Every single Democrat has signed a bill to enact Roe v. Wade standards. We're all standing together and fighting. And what we have to do now is defend ourselves from these right wing politicians who want to go into the exam room with women and their doctors.
You know, these right-wing politicians make crappy doctors and they've gone in and defined medical doctors. Doctors are looking at this legislation and say, what in the world does that mean. So, what we're going to do is call them out.
Look, there are four Republicans -- four Republicans who said they would protect women's reproductive freedoms during the campaign.
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All we need is one of them. We can block this disastrous legislation and then we can wait for the next battle.
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But what we're going to do is continue to work to protect women's reproductive freedom in North Carolina.
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Yes. Well, first, we're not a referendum state.
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We had gerrymandered districts. So, we have a Republican majority. Thank goodness I'm a Democratic governor so I can rally the troops. For four years - for four years I have kept abortion legislation from becoming law that Republicans had passed. But in this election cycle, we - we lost -- they - they gained a super majority by one vote in each chamber. So, now we've in a different position. We've - we've - we've held the - held the line for four years.
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But if we can get a Republican to say, look, this is not right.
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Like they did in South Carolina. Like they did in Nebraska.
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And their constituents, the more they learn, the more they are going to demand that these Republican legislators step up.
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