MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript - Abortion and Womens' Health

Interview

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SMERCONISH: Today former Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum announced via press release from his PAC that he, too, will be in Austin on Thursday to show his support for the Texas abortion bill. And Texas isn`t the only place the abortion rights fight is being fought. Last week, the North Carolina state senate approved abortion restrictions that could leave the state with just one abortion clinic.

Yesterday in the state capitol, 64 people protesting the restrictions were arrested.

In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker signed legislation limited abortion access in his state on Friday, but by last night, a federal judge had granted a temporary restraining order on that law.

This map shows the states where new abortion restrictions are being proposed which, in various ways, would make it harder for a woman seeking an abortion to access one.

Ilyse Hogue is the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Sylvia Garcia is a Democratic state senator from Texas.

Senator Garcia, let me begin with you.

I don`t get it. My reading of Roe v. Wade says that the standard is set based on viability. At 20 weeks, we`re not talking viability. It would seem that, on its face, this bill would be unconstitutional. So, why go through all the effort if that`s, in fact, going to be the holding of a court someday?

SYLVIA GARCIA (D), TEXAS STATE SENATOR: Well, we have actually been asking
ourselves that same question here in Texas.

I agree with you. I think on its face it appears that it would be unconstitutional, but, ultimately, of course, it will be up to the courts to decide. As we -- as you stated earlier, Wisconsin yesterday, of course, a federal court there has already put an injunction on implementation of their action.

So I think the same thing will happen here in Texas. I think we`re on a path to litigation in the courts, ultimately, with this bill if it passes.

SMERCONISH: Ilyse, it seems to me you may as well say, well, one week after conception, we`re going to ban all abortion because that would have the same constitutional standard as would the 20-week measure.

ILYSE HOGUE, PRESIDENT, NARAL PRO-CHOICE AMERICA: Well, I actually think that that is the goal of these radical ideologues who are driving this legislation and their politician friends in these statehouses.Their goal has remained the same. That`s to outlaw abortion, as well as limit women`s other reproductive choices. What`s more interesting is how they`re resorting to doing it. These politicians in Texas and North Carolina, and I`m from Texas as well, know that they don`t have popular support on their side, and so they`re resorting to cheating, changing the rules, doing these things under the dark of night because they know that there is a political price to pay.

There is a health price to pay, there is a political price to pay, there is a financial price to pay when these things go to court, and yet, they are so beholden to their days to their extreme base that they`re driving this out-of-step agenda anyway.

SMERCONISH: Senator Garcia, to what do you attribute the activity not only in the Lone Star State, but in all those states that I referenced in introducing this conversation? Do you attribute it to a reading, perhaps a misreading, of what that Gosnell trial in my hometown of Philadelphia was all about?

GARCIA: Well, I think what -- to me it seems to be sort of an agenda nationally by -- by -- by, as was stated earlier, the radical right, the extremists who just want to make it harder and harder for women to have access to reproductive health care, to have any kind of real access to health care generally.

I think that it`s part of a national agenda, and they`re trying to chip away. And I totally agree. I think it`s just a backdoor way to try to ban all abortions in this country.

SMERCONISH: I`m wondering if there is a strategy that`s now going to be employed by pro-choice forces of getting women who have had abortions to tell their stories, almost in the same way that when people recognized individuals within their family or their social orbit who were homosexual of lesbian, all of a sudden, it opened an awareness that people previously had not had.

Ilyse, is that a strategy? I`m thinking in part of an op-ed that I read in "The New York Times" over the weekend where a woman wrote very effectively about her mother having had about abortion.

HOGUE: I think it`s not so much a strategy as a reality. Look, women who have had abortions are our daughters, our mothers, our sisters, our friends. They`re everywhere. It`s one in three American women, and so we are all around. It`s also important to recognize that we have got to take away the shame. The shame doesn`t start and end with abortion, but it`s very acute there.

Women are ashamed for exercising their reproductive rights. They`re ashamed when they`re raped, as we saw in Steubenville, and this is part of an anti-woman agenda that wants to make us ashamed of being real woman leading real lives today, and I think women have had enough. I think that is what we`re seeing in Texas, in North Carolina and all around this country.

We`re getting calls from national members everywhere saying, what can I do? This is it. This is enough. We will support Texas, we will support North Carolina, but we will get these folks out of office who are driving these extreme policies that are bad for women, bad for our families.

SMERCONISH: Ilyse Hogue, thank you very much. State Senator Sylvia Garcia, we appreciate your being here.

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