Under Tim Walz, Minnesota went from a pro-choice state to a radically pro-abortion state at the expense of pregnant women.
Under Tim Walz, Minnesota went from a pro-choice state to a radically pro-abortion state at the expense of pregnant women.
T here are many ways in which Tim Walz’s record as Minnesota governor reveals him as a radical progressive even by the standards of his party. One of those is his extremism on abortion. It’s conventional wisdom after Dobbs that abortion has, overnight, become an issue with electoral downsides only for pro-lifers. But if anyone is a pro-abortion extremist, it’s Tim Walz. He removes any pretense that Democrats are the moderates on this issue.
Exhibit A: Two bills signed by Walz in 2023. Those bills repealed Minnesota’s prohibition on coercing women into having abortions. They stripped out of the state’s laws the requirement that women give informed consent — indeed, any consent — to an abortion. They guaranteed an unqualified right to abortion up until the moment of birth, and even gutted protections for children born alive after abortion.
There’s much more, but the above will strike some people as so bold a claim that it simply cannot be true. It is, and the proof is right there in the law.
Before Dobbs: Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Minnesota
First, the background: Until 2023, Minnesota Republicans acted as a check on the state lurching hard to the left. As we noted in our editorial on the 2023 Minnesota legislative session, “the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party [DFL] — formed by a 1944 merger between Democrats and a leftist party from the heyday of American socialism — held the trifecta of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature for only two years between 1991 and 2022. Republicans most recently held the state house from 2015 to 2018, and the state senate from 2017 to 2022.”
One result was that Minnesota pursued a compromise policy on abortion. State law sought, so much as possible, to be simultaneously pro-choice and pro-life: pro-choice in liberally permitting abortion in most cases, and pro-life in enshrining an official policy of encouraging pregnant women to give birth rather than have abortions. That official policy, in turn, had a number of facets: protection of pregnant women against fraud and coercion, required reports of women dying or suffering complications for abortion, funding for counseling on abortion alternatives, bans on the use of state funds to encourage abortion, and laws requiring doctors to treat infants born alive after abortions.
In the 2022 midterm election, however, alongside Walz’s reelection, the state senate flipped to the DFL. It was hardly an overwhelming mandate in an election season where Walz leaned very hard on the abortion issue against a weak gubernatorial opponent. Republicans won a 34–33 majority in 2016 while the DFL won a narrow statewide popular-vote majority, 50.1 percent to 49 percent. In 2020, the DFL again won the state senate popular vote by a slim 49.8 percent to 48.4 percent margin, and again Republicans held a 34–33 majority. Post-Dobbs, the vote was very marginally more favorable to the DFL, 50.7 percent to 48.6 percent, and that resulted in a 34–33 DFL majority.
When the legislature reconvened in January 2023, Walz and the DFL took their one-seat majority as a mandate to launch a comprehensive culture war. One of the cornerstones of that war was the “Protect Reproductive Options Act” or “PRO Act,” which passed in January 2023 and which Walz enthusiastically supported and signed into law. During the PRO Act debates, “Republicans tried and failed to pass dozens of amendments, including prohibiting third trimester abortions except when the mother’s life is at risk and requiring licensing of facilities providing the procedure.” Walz and his party beat them all back.
The PRO Act enshrined in Minnesota law a “fundamental right to . . . obtain an abortion” with no limit in time — all the way to the moment of birth — and immune from any more restrictive regulation by local governments. The usual suspects will claim that this does not establish an abortion right up to the moment of birth. But the language of the PRO Act is sweeping and categorical, leaving no possible room for restriction of abortion at any time or for any reason. The resistance of Walz and his allies to any amendment limiting third-trimester abortions makes plain their intent on that score.
But they weren’t done. A more comprehensive bill, Minnesota Senate Bill 2995, passed the legislature in May 2023, and was again signed into law by Walz, and it swept away nearly all the protective and modestly pro-life features of existing Minnesota law. S.F. 2995 is where we see the full scope of Walz’s pro-abortion vision: his determination to strip women of all protections for safety and informed consent and to place state funding firmly on the side of encouraging as many abortions as possible.
Minnesota has, since the passage of these bills, been regularly touted by Walz as a booming abortion factory for women all over the Midwest. By the end of 2023, 30 percent of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood in the state were for out-of-staters, resulting in expansion of the organization’s business in the state.
Coercion and Consent
In order to understand all the mischief buried in the 909-page text of S.F. 2995, it’s necessary to look not only at what it enacted but what it repealed. At first glance, the list is forbidding:
I’ll focus for now on just a few of those items. Notice that the list of repealed rules includes Minnesota Rule 4700.1900:
The purpose and scope of parts 4700.1900 to 4700.2500 is to prescribe requirements applicable to family planning special project grants. . . . Minnesota Statutes, section 145.925, contains a provision prohibiting use of these funds for abortions, and for family planning services to unemancipated minors in an elementary or secondary school building; requiring notice to parents or guardians of unemancipated minors to whom abortion or sterilization is advised, except as provided in Minnesota Statutes, sections 144.341 and 144.342; and prohibiting coercing anyone to undergo an abortion or sterilization. [Emphasis added.]
Section 145.925 was amended by S.F. 2995, including changing its title from “Family Planning Grants” to “Sexual and Reproductive Health Services Grants.” The section’s stated goal was changed from “prepregnancy family planning services” to, “It is the goal of the state to increase access to sexual and reproductive health services for people who experience barriers, whether geographic, cultural, financial, or other, in access to such services.” (Emphasis added.)
S.F. 2995 repealed a section stating that “family planning shall mean voluntary action by individuals to prevent or aid conception but does not include the performance, or make referrals for encouragement of voluntary termination of pregnancy.” It repealed another funding ban, which read: “The commissioner shall not make special grants pursuant to this section to any nonprofit corporation which performs abortions. No state funds shall be used under contract from a grantee to any nonprofit corporation which performs abortions.”
S.F. 2995 also repealed a prohibition on using schools to push abortion or contraception on minors, which had read: “No funds provided by grants made pursuant to this section shall be used to support any family planning services for any unemancipated minor in any elementary or secondary school building.”
S.F. 2995 further repealed Section 145.925’s informed-consent provisions, including eliminating the requirement that women be told they are free to withdraw their consent:
A grant recipient shall inform any person requesting counseling on family planning methods or procedures of:
(1) Any methods or procedures which may be followed, including identification of any which are experimental or any which may pose a health hazard to the person; (2) A description of any attendant discomforts or risks which might reasonably be expected; (3) A fair explanation of the likely results, should a method fail; (4) A description of any benefits which might reasonably be expected of any method; (5) A disclosure of appropriate alternative methods or procedures; (6) An offer to answer any inquiries concerning methods of procedures; and (7) An instruction that the person is free either to decline commencement of any method or procedure or to withdraw consent to a method or procedure at any reasonable time. [Emphasis added.]
Then we get to the kicker: Walz actually signed the repeal of the ban on coercion:
Coercion; penalty. Any person who receives compensation for services under any program receiving financial assistance under this section, who coerces or endeavors to coerce any person to undergo an abortion or sterilization procedure by threatening the person with the loss of or disqualification for the receipt of any benefit or service under a program receiving state or federal financial assistance shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. [Emphasis added.]
Why is Tim Walz in favor of coercing women into abortions? And if he says he’s not in favor, why did he repeal the law against it?
No Consent, No Information
S.F. 2995 also eroded protections to ensure that women who had abortions gave their informed consent. For example, an amendment to Section 18. Minnesota Statutes 2022, section 256B.0625, subdivision 16 redefined “medically necessary” abortions to those “determined to be medically necessary by the treating provider,” striking language that required that “the patient has given her consent to the abortion in writing unless the patient is physically or legally incapable of providing informed consent to the procedure, in which case consent will be given as otherwise provided by law.”
The bill also repealed Section 145.412, which made it unlawful to perform abortions without “the consent of the woman submitting to the abortion after a full explanation of the procedure and effect of the abortion.” (It also repealed the bans on abortions by unlicensed physicians or in violation of state health commission rules.)
S.F. 2995 repealed section 145.4242, the specific informed-consent statute. Thus, Walz removed from the state’s laws the rule that “no abortion shall be performed in this state except with the voluntary and informed consent of the female upon whom the abortion is to be performed.” No longer are women required to be told, for example, of the medical risks of abortions, the age of the unborn child, or the mother’s rights to receive state assistance or paternal child support. A companion section requiring the state to publish information about support for pregnant women was also repealed.
Born Alive
Prior to 2023, Minnesota had a robust Born Alive Infant Protection Act, codified at section 145.423. It required a doctor be on hand for any abortion after 20 weeks who was prepared to take steps “to preserve the life and health of any born alive infant that is the result of the abortion.” It gave detailed definition of the protected status in law of the life of any “member of the species Homo sapiens” who had been extracted from the womb and “breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of a natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.” It provided specific penalties for the failure to provide medical care, and that the child would be cared for by the state if no parent wanted it.
That was repealed as well by S.F. 2995, along with requirements for keeping records of when a child was born alive. The bill substituted more vague language shorn of the penalties, protections, and definitions of the prior act, and making no reference to preserving life or health, to abortion, or to when an infant is defined as being “born alive”:
An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel care for the infant who is born alive.
No Choices for Women
Tim Walz may say that he’s just in favor of choice. But his record goes much further than that. He won’t even protect women against coerced or non-consenting abortions. He’ll deny them information about their options, remove basic health and safety regulations that apply in all other areas of medicine, bankroll abortions with taxpayer money, and defend abortion all the way to birth — and beyond.