Anti-abortion activists urge Senate to keep penalties against doctors
Apr. 6—CONCORD — A large contingent of anti-abortion activists turned out Thursday for a public hearing, hoping to block legislation that would get rid of criminal and civil penalties for doctors who perform abortions after six months of pregnancy.
Medical professionals and their allies said doing away with this part of the Fetal Life Protection Act would help attract obstetricians and gynecologists here and retain the declining number of birthing centers in New Hampshire.
Several mothers with young children waited for a few hours outside a State House committee room to testify on this bill (HB 224) and a second to enshrine in state law (HB 88) that women have abortion rights up until the fetus is 24 weeks old.
Dr. Katrin Bergeron, a family physician from Lee, said expectant mothers can face "physician bias" to abort a child with medical problems.
"Decriminalization equals legalization. When something is legalized, we consider it to be okay," Bergeron said as her adopted son, Henry, sat in a child carrier behind her.
Both bills cleared the closely divided House of Representatives last month and now face an uncertain future before the GOP-led Senate.
Joan Espinola, an anti-abortion activist from Salem, said the criminal penalties were a key part of the abortion ban that Gov. Chris Sununu signed into law as part of a state budget deal in 2021.
"No one will take seriously a law that has no penalties associated with transgressing it," Espinola said.
"If this bill passes you will have innocent blood on your hands."
But Dr. Daniella Albushies, an OB-GYN from Bedford, said pregnancies are becoming more high risk and this criminal penalty can cause greater harm to expectant mothers who have complications late in pregnancies.
"There will be delays in the care of that mother; she will bleed more than necessary," Albushies said.
Impact on medical recruitment
Dr. Ilana Cass, chair of the OB/GYN department at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, warned the law will make it harder to attract young doctors in the future.
"This will have an impact on my recruiting," Cass said, noting that four of the 11 doctors practicing advanced fetal medicine in the state are set to retire within the next 18 months.
Cass said her department just had a solid recruiting class of future OB/GYNs because New Hampshire made abortions legal for the first six months while more than a dozen states imposed further restrictions since the Supreme Court last June repealed Roe v. Wade that for 50 years had made abortions legal up to the viability of a fetus.
Former state Sen. Tom Sherman, D-Rye and a retired physician, said these penalties fail to recognize that medicine often requires judgment calls.
"In that instant, critical decisions must be made by the mother and the clinician," Sherman said.
"There is not time for (consulting) with a lawyer to make sure that the patient is sick enough to meet the ... criteria for an exception."
Sununu said getting rid of penalties against doctors is the only change in the law that he could support, though he did not testify on it Thursday.
Rep. Daniel Wolf, R-Newbury and that bill's prime author, said doctors can already lose their licenses or face civil suits or malpractice suits if they act recklessly in these cases.
"This carve out is redundant and unnecessary," Wolf said.
Rep. Robert Lynn, R-Windham, said there was no reason doctors should have this protection from prosecution while police officers can face homicide charges if they use deadly force unnecessarily on the street.
"You get treated as the law requires and I think that should happen to a doctor," Lynn said.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sharon Carson, R-Londonderry, said her panel would not make a recommendation on both bills until next week.
Had it come to a vote, the panel likely would have deadlocked, 2-2, because Sen. Bill Gannon, R-Sandown and an abortion rights opponent, was ill and absent from the hearing.
