It’s the best-kept secret of the last 24 hours in Connecticut. Only one news outlet caught it. And even they might have missed the significance of their own reporting. Pro-lifers defeated the Safe Harbor Bill yesterday. HB 5414, by the time it passed the House of Representatives 87-60 last night, was no longer the bill against which FIC Action had warned.

We basically won.

Essentially, FIC Action had a win last night, perhaps a second win on top of that, and one definite loss. Here are the three things you need to know about last night:

The Wins HB 5414, in its original form, would have protected an abortionist who breaks the law in Texas and flees to Connecticut to escape enforcement. But prior to the bill being called in the House yesterday, HB 5414 was amended so that it only protects an abortionist from Texas if the abortion occurred in Connecticut. This amendment essentially moots the whole law. The Texas pro-life law that HB 5414 is supposedly defending against only applied to abortions happening in Texas in the first place.“So why pass the law at all?” you may ask.

This is a phenomenon that we have observed among Connecticut’s anti-family activists for the last few years. Their crusades have entered a Potemkin Village stage, where they pass laws against phantom menaces that do not actually exist. We first saw this in 2017 when they banned “conversion therapy,” even though no one on either side could show that such a thing even existed in Connecticut. Later that same year, Hartford passed a municipal ordinance against a pregnancy center that was written in such a way that it could not actually be enforced.The motivation of these Potemkin Village laws appears to be to gin up grassroots energy on the Left prior to elections. But the laws do not actually accomplish anything. It’s a strange fraud that Connecticut’s liberal groups perpetrate on their own members to maintain power.

CT Mirror was the only news outlet to report on the amendment.

Another important catch, however, belongs to The Hartford Courant, which reported that “insiders” said SJ 30, the Senate proposal to add abortion to our state constitution, “is not expected to come up for a vote.” If this should prove to be the case, that is a huge win. Of the three abortion bills, SJ 30 is far and away the most extreme.

The Loss Nevertheless, the Abortionist Non-Doctor Bill was approved by the House yesterday. It was originally HB 5261. It became Section 7 of HB 5414.This is what the media means when they describe HB 5414 as the biggest abortion bill in 32 years. HB 5414, in its current form, expands abortion by allowing nurses and midwives to perform abortions. That bill now goes to the Senate.We beat the assisted suicide bill and, in essence, the safe harbor bill. We may have beaten the abortion amendment too. The abortionist non-doctor bill (which HB 5414 has become) is now our biggest challenge in the weeks remaining in this session.

The Players HB 5414, the Abortion Expansion Bill, passed the House 87-60. 14 Democrats voted against it, including three deputy House Speakers. Seven Republicans voted for it. That is an unusually large number of Democrats to vote against their party on the matter of abortion. As noted by CT Insider, this was due to the leadership of Rep. Trenee McGee, a newly elected pro-life Democrat from West Haven. According to CT Insider, ten of the 14 Democrats to vote no were “people of color.” Five of the Republicans who voted yes, meanwhile, were women. The split between well-heeled progressive white women (of both parties), and the minority communities for whom they claim to speak, has long been known to pro-lifers. It may be a sign of things to come that the split was publicly revealed by this vote.

One of the seven Republicans who voted yes was Rep. Laura Devlin, Bob Stefanowski’s handpicked running mate. What are pro-life voters to make of the fact that fourteen House Democrats are more conservative on abortion than the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor? In his own comments on the bill, Gov. Lamont expressed more fear of a social conservative PAC than he did of his opponents. Lamont seems to understand the potential of social conservativism to swing an election. Do the Republicans? We know at least the Republicans who voted against HB 5414 do. Many of them spoke eloquently against the bill.  Watch for more information on that, and on further steps to fight the bill, in our next email alert.  Click here to support FIC Action.