By Michael Shepherd - June 8, 2023
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Maine Democrats set up a quick vote on a controversial abortion bill. Here's what to expect. The Democratic-led Legislature moved hastily overnight to set a Thursday vote in the Judiciary Committee on an abortion-rights measure from Gov. Janet Mills that has prompted major mobilization from the religious right over the last few months.

It adds up to Democratic governor's biggest expenditure of political capital after her 2022 victory over former Gov. Paul LePage. Abortion defined the campaign after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. While Mills burnished her credentials on abortion rights, she also repeatedly said that she wanted to keep Maine's access laws as they were. In January, she announced her support for this measure and several others on the same topic.

The bill would put Maine's abortion laws among the most permissive in the country, joining seven other states to allow doctors to perform abortions after fetal viability around 24 weeks. Those abortions are rare, with Maine seeing no abortions after 20 weeks in 2021, and Mills has said the measure is aimed at rare situations in which likely fatal anomalies are discovered late in pregnancies.

Mills' measure led to a rare rebuke from Maine's Catholic bishop, and it has become a cause for the anti-abortion movement. Opponents jammed the State House during a May hearing on the measure, with 650 of them alone signing up to testify and stretching the proceeding to the following morning. The evangelical Christian Civic League of Maine has called this bill and others "shocking examples" of abortion expansions.

That hearing was the last legislative word on the bill before the committee session set for Thursday. The delay of the bill has been a notable one, since it was released with enough Democratic sponsors to get it through both chambers and to Mills' desk. Only seven legislative Democrats did not sponsor it, with some of them citing a range of reasons.

Carroll Conley, the executive director of the civic league, questioned whether Democrats had the votes to pass the measure in a Tuesday interview with WVOM. But their move to set the hearing today indicates that they believe they do, and Conley's group and their allies responded overnight by urging opponents to pack the committee room on short notice.

Expect no more than minor changes to the measure, given that Mills has already ruled out a narrower exception to Maine's current viability restriction targeted at fetal anomalies, similar to one recently instituted in New Hampshire. Democrats look set to send this bill to the floor. Doing so will prompt a visceral reaction from opponents who have put a lot into their fight against a measure that remains likely to pass.