By: Lauren Heffker & Tryfon Boukouvidis, LSU Manship School News Service
Published: May 15, 2019
BATON ROUGE — Legislation that would limit or ban abortion in Louisiana easily cleared House and Senate committees on Wednesday, echoing a surge of similar bills in Republican-controlled legislatures in the South.
Pro-choice advocates protested the bills inside the state Capitol. The protests led to several arrests after demonstrators poured fake blood onto the marble floors in Memorial Hall.
The House Health and Welfare Committee advanced a controversial proposal that would outlaw the abortion of a fetus with a detectable heartbeat, which usually occurs around six weeks.
The “fetal heartbeat” bill, sponsored by Sen. John Milkovich, D-Shreveport, has received bipartisan support and was approved last week by the Senate. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a pro-life Democrat running for re-election, has publicly supported it.
In March, Edwards said he would be inclined to sign the bill into law.
“States across the nation are saying, ‘We are no longer going to devalue life,” Milkovich said. “We are going to acknowledge the sanctity of human life.’”
Read more in The Advertiser.
LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 