Nicholas Goldberg: Karen Bass says she’ll protect Angelenos’ abortion rights. But can the mayor of L.A. really do that?
Nicholas Goldberg: Karen Bass says she’ll protect Angelenos’ abortion rights. But can the mayor of L.A. really do that?
AUGUST 11, 2013
In a world where many politicians are trying to appeal to the anti-abortion crowd, Angelenos who believe in a woman’s right to choose an abortion have had only one champion: Mayor Eric Garcetti.
At a City Council meeting Monday, Garcetti said that if Angelenos want an abortion, they would be “willing to make sacrifices.”
“We have already shown that as a city we will be willing to stand with the majority of Angelenos who believe in a woman’s right to choose,” he said.
Garcetti was speaking Monday after a similar meeting for the anti-abortion West Hollywood City Council, also hosted by Garcetti and attended by a phalanx of city officials, from the mayor down.
Both meetings are part of a concerted anti-abortion effort in California and in L.A. city politics. It has been years since a sitting mayor in a major city has spoken on the topic, though a few other L.A. elected officials have come to the council’s defense on abortion.
The Garcetti campaign on abortion was perhaps unprecedented. It came in the wake of a woman seeking an abortion at a clinic in San Diego, where women had been turned away because of the state’s anti-abortion law.
While there is no law that requires clinics to offer abortions as their standard, abortion-rights supporters say that’s not the case if the clinic says no. That law had prompted the clinic in San Diego to offer the woman an “emergency” abortion that she refused.
That was enough for Garcetti and others at the San Diego City Council meeting and for Mayor Kevin Johnson to intervene and try to end the abortion debate. Later, the city issued an apology.
“There is no room for any type of discrimination under the law,” Garcetti said last year after the San Diego debacle.