(Please note sarcasm in last paragraph!)

H.B. 200 Informed Consent, which requires ultrasound images to be taken and then displayed to women seeking abortions, if they so choose [to see the images], has generated much controversy, as anything having to do with a woman’s right to choose does.  This bill made it through the Utah House last week.

An article in the Deseret News has yielded some interesting comments from readers:

This law is a fairly transparent attempt to reduce the number of abortions by counting on pregnant women to change their minds after seeing an ultrasound of their living fetus. Naturally there are two ways to look at this: the pro-life view is that if a woman is confronted with graphic images of the fetus she can’t otherwise see, she will make an emotional decision against the abortion. The pro-choice view is that this is the equivalent of a protester standing outside the clinic with graphic photos of aborted fetuses — in other words, intimidation. Both views have some validity, which is why abortion is such a difficult debate in the first place. How many women will “choose” to see these images, is hard to say; whether any medical providers will somehow “show” the images to a woman without being asked is also hard to predict. And so the tug of war over a highly personal issue, between two equally passionate factions, with vulnerable, pregnant women in the middle, goes on and on.

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Legislature, please show some compassion to victims of sexual violence. Imagine if it was your daughter, wife or sister who was attacked. Would you still thrust this upon her?

These women CAN’T sleep at night. That is why they make the painful choice to have an abortion. This is a bill of re-victimization. Even in the cases where the pregnancy was just unplanned, it is not the government’s right to interfere with the woman or her doctor’s decision.

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What a complete WASTE of tax payers dollars and a HUGE WASTE of our State Legislatures time. We have so many other huge problems like our deficit and our unemployment crisis to fix. This bills only purpose is to try and make a woman change their mind as the congressman said in the article. To all Utah residents and to all the members of the Utah congress, abortion is LEGAL! Get used to it. I can’t wait to cast my vote this next election against any incumbent who voted in support of this. The abortion clinics should have the choice to support and install this in their facility, not be forced to. If this passes into law I hope the ACLU will fight this and get it overturned.

H.B. 200 does not provide complete disclosure to the woman seeking an abortion.  While this bill is aimed in reality at attempting to have women change their minds about abortion (even after long and often painful thought into the decision), there are no provisions whatsoever to provide financial support by the government if the woman changes her mind.  The “information” and “education” does not, for example, include the reality of the costs of raising a child; the emotional distress of giving the baby up for adoption and subsequently the legal rights of the birth mother to stay connected, or not, to the child; or parenting issues education.  [Tongue in cheek] If state legislators are intent on making it difficult for women to make their own choices through a bill that legislates moral values, they should include in such a bill the financial obligation and commitment to support  the woman and her child should she change her mind about having the abortion.  “Informed” consent?  Not really.

If one lawmaker has his way, Daylight Savings Time could be on its way out….of Utah, that is.

H.B. 288, Daylight Savings Time, proposes to exempt the state from observance of daylight saving time.

Quoted in a Deseret News Article, Rep. Kenneth Sumsion, R-American Fork says

“Over time, I’ve had so many constituents say they hate switching,” said Sumsion, who Wednesday introduced HB288.

There would still be 24 hours in the day. There would still be the same hours and minutes of daylight and darkness, depending on where the Earth is in its yearly trip around the sun.

“It’s a question of convenience and what we really want,” Sumsion said.

How would it be to not have to remember to “fall back” or “spring ahead”?

(cross-posted to Utah Legislature Watch)

It is no secret that medical care is inadequate for inmates.  Legislators have a history of not approving adequate funding for the care of those who are incarcerated.  So when a bill is proposed that would save taxpayers money and still allow for inmates to receive medical care (under the provisions of the bill), you would think that Legislators would be happy, right?

Wrong.  The insurance industry obviously has influence over legislators with this issue.

Yesterday the House shot down a bill that would permit inmates to use their private insurance to pay for their health care while incarcerated.

H.B. 22Inmate Health Insurance Amendments,would require the inmates' private carrier to serve as the primary insurer while serving time in a state or county facility.

According to an article in the Deseret News,

House members voted against the bill, saying state taxpayers should pick up the cost, even if the inmate is insured.Opponents said during debate that the bill painted insurers as bad guys, when in fact the bad guys are the ones who broke laws that got them arrested and incarcerated. They also argued that the bill was anti-free market and smacked of government takeover of a private enterprise.

Interestingly, the article points out the amount of donations candidates received in the 2008 elections.

In the 2008 election, the insurance industry gave $313,311 to state-level candidates (including the Legislature, governor and attorney general), according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Insurance companies gave the second-most of any industry that year, outdistanced only by the securities and investment industry, which gave $614,207, according to the institute.

And big insurance companies lose few political fights in the Utah Legislature.

The sponsor of the bill, Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, points out the cost savings to taxpayers with the passage of this bill.

The bill would save county jails more money than the state, with only a handful of felons in the state prison having outside health insurance. But a number of county jail inmates, who may be sentenced for several months up to a year, have insurance while incarcerated, Ray said.

"Taxpayers are getting hammered, and it's time for insurance companies to step up and pay for what they've contracted for," said Ray just before his bill was voted down on a 30-44 vote.

This is just one example of how lawmakers are"incarcerated" themselves by big corporations....and at the expense of taxpayers and those in need of care.

Sen. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George is working on a bill that would, if passed, required schools to incorporate instruction about contraceptives in health education courses.

According to a Salt Lake Tribune Poll,  citizens are evenly divided on the issue.

Urquhart said the poll results don’t surprise him, but he hopes that once people understand the details of his bill, they’ll be more supportive.

“This is a very scary topic for a lot of people,” Urquhart said. “People I talk with initially have a strong reaction one way or another but if we can talk about the particulars of the bill, they almost universally approve of it.”

Right now many educators do not even broach the topic since the current law, while allowing the instruction of contraceptives, has many restrictions on how and what can be taught.

Urquhart said the change is needed.

“Few things that our youth do can have more of a profound impact on their lives than sex,” Urquhart said. “We’re seeing that in the numbers of teenage pregnancies and infection rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Education can improve behavior in all aspects of life, including sex.”

Under this measure, abstinence would remain in the curriculum and parents would still have the opt-out provision for their children.

There is opposition, of course.

Gayle Ruzicka, leader of the conservative Utah Eagle Forum, said she would expect people of many faiths to have similar feelings.

“It is a religion that really pushes parental involvement,” Ruzicka said. “Those parents that realize it’s their responsibility, not the school’s responsibility are going to say, ‘Schools, stay out of the lives of my children when it comes to these very personal things.’”

Ruzicka said Wednesday she hadn’t yet read Urquhart’s bill but would oppose removing the prohibition against teachers advocating the use of contraceptives and would oppose requiring teachers to include contraceptives in their instruction.

“When you teach them about sex, that just encourages sexual activity,” Ruzicka said. She said the current law should remain in place.

This mindset has it that kids would never think about sex if they didn’t have sex education.  This is not admitting reality.  Kids think about sex and kids experiment, no matter what parents do to educate their children.  Pregnancies occur and many are those from families who think it will never happen to them.  The lack of sex education in schools likely has the opposite effect of  encouraging sexual activity.  There is no guarantee, either that most parents teach their children about sex.

Melissa Bird, executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Council (PPAC), however, said the results of the poll are surprising. PPAC, which worked with Urquhart and the state PTA to create the bill, conducted its own poll through Dan Jones and Associates in September. In that poll, PPAC asked respondents if they agreed or disagreed that “comprehensive sex education will likely reduce the number of unintended teen pregnancies.” Sixty-seven percent of those polled in the PPAC survey agreed.

This is a sensible bill.  Kudos to Sen. Urquhart for realizing the necessity of this plan.

Utah Policy editors have published a piece on options for transportation of school children.

Currently, the Salt Lake City School District uses Utah Transit Authority for some of its school transportation needs. Many private schools also rely on UTA for student transportation.

Today, UTA bus routes obviously aren’t maximized for school needs. But within a couple of years, UTA’s backbone will be completed with new TRAX lines to Draper, South Jordan, West Valley, and the airport, and FrontRunner south to Provo.

Once those lines are completed, the next big program will be fill-in projects with streetcars, bus rapid transit, neighborhood bus service, bike trails, and walking trails. At that point, public transit service will be ubiquitous across the Wasatch Front, serving almost all neighborhoods. The overall transit system will then be robust enough to accommodate needs of older students.

This might be worth considering  if mass transportation wasn’t still  facing significant reductions in service due to budget woes.  But until there is a firm commitment to mass transportation without constantly being under the financial axe, such ideas will not be realized.

Dream on.