Letters to the Editor: Karen Bass is right, abortion is a local issue and the people who most need it aren’t in the city. If people here supported our state’s right to abortion, or even a right to it, the state would be less likely to turn to “abortion tourism”-a movement where people move to states with the most restrictions on abortion-to obtain abortions.
The bottom line is that there is no good reason for the abortion restrictions the anti-abortion laws impose in the Golden State.
And Karen is still wrong when she says “What has the governor done that requires the ‘abortion tourism’ approach?” The governor has repeatedly made clear that the most important element of his agenda is to protect life here by keeping the state’s constitutional amendment for life-and-death-cases. But the governor also has been clear enough that one-in-five women and one-in-three newborns will be aborted in California by the time a new governor takes office. And the anti-abortion laws the governor enacted last year are so far from being the best choices we have available, that they are, by far, one of the worst. The most egregious of those laws was the one that allows doctors to perform an abortion on a fetus as close to the end of the pregnancy as they want.
I don’t buy Karen’s claim that no one who wants to live here or wants to stay here will move to the Golden State. There are plenty of people who don’t like most of the things we do here, and plenty of people who are against abortion. But it’s not true that no one who wants to live here or wants to stay here wants to have an abortion-in this town, anyway. Just a few months ago, I was talking with the owner of a real estate business who told me that the anti-abortion laws enacted last year hurt the real estate business here. The reason, he said, is that the state has a real financial incentive to force out those entrepreneurs who are opposed to the abortion restrictions. After all, property tax rates are fixed by the state anyway, whether or not a person lives here, and the anti-abortion