Volunteers Needed to Challenge Right to Life Anti-Choice Ballot Signatures

By MUUSJN on Friday, December 27th, 2019

Volunteers Needed To Help Defeat Abortion Ban

Click HERE to Sign Up with Planned Parenthood of Michigan

On December 23rd, Michigan Right to Life (RTL) submitted 379,418 signatures on petitions to the Michigan Secretary of State to criminalize dilation and extraction, the most safe, commonly used method of abortion in Michigan. The petition is intended by anti-choice activists to go to the Michigan legislature and avoid a certain veto by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Under Michigan law, this petition drive must get 340,047 valid signatures to go to the Michigan legislature.

Here are four reasons this petition is just WRONG for Michigan women and Michigan families:

  1. A ban on D&E method abortions is unconstitutional. Courts have blocked D&E bans each time they have been challenged in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the Northland Family Planning Clinic.
  2. This abortion ban interferes with a physician’s ability to care for their patients, according to ACOG (the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists). Doctors, under this ban, would face criminal penalties including prison.
  3. A decision to have an abortion should be made by women and their doctors, not politicians.
  4. This proposal makes no exceptions for circumstances including lethal fetal diagnosis, rape, incest or maternal well-being.

If the proposal is adopted by state legislators, the MI ACLU has said it will challenge it in court.

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED TO REVIEW SIGNATURES

Click HERE to SIGN UP

The Michigan Bureau of Elections has several weeks to review the signatures to determine their validity. Planned Parenthood of Michigan is looking for volunteers to help check and challenge RTL abortion ban signatures. This work involves “high level, data and detail driven volunteers who will be willing to be part of a rapid response team that will be tasked with going to Lansing, on short notice, over the course of several days in January to do the important work of checking signatures and petition sheets turned in by Right to Life”.

Volunteer Requirements:

  1. Your own transportation to and from Lansing;
  2. Your own laptop computer;
  3. Ability to sit for several hours in a row and do the meticulous and detail oriented work;
  4. Ability to follow careful and and specific instructions and guidelines for determining the validity of signatures; and
  5. Participate in a pre-event webinar.

MUUSJN’s Interfaith Reproductive Justice Coalition, that includes over a dozen women’s and LGBTQ justice organizations, opposes the D&E ban petition campaign.

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