UPDATE: I’m about 200 comments behind or reading the comments people have posted, so it will be quite a while before I have read them all. To anyone who asked a question that I haven’t responded to, my apologies.
But I learned a short while ago that David Nir has updated the diary which this diary is about. I went over to look at it, and was pleased by the change. A note has been added giving correct information about the bill Heath Mello co-sponsored — and as a bonus, David obtained and printed a note from Planned Parenthood of Nevada which answers a lot of the question about the puzzling 100% rating which VoteSmart had reported Mello receiving in 2015. Well worth looking at if you haven’t seen it yet.
Also: Chris Reeves has a very good diary up now about Heath Mello, which gives us the first good description of Mello from someone who actually has met him. Chris’ diary doesn’t resolve all the questions which have been raised about Mello, but it is a very interesting and informative piece. I highly recommend going over and reading it, if you haven’t read it already.
I’m sorry to write this as a diary, rather than as a reply in David Nir’s diary which posted this morning. But there are already several hundred comments in the reply section of that diary; any attempt I make to post corrections to the incorrect information in that diary and in those comments is going to be lost.
In David Nir’s diary he writes:
Heath Mello, a Democrat who is running against the incumbent Republican mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, had supported legislation in the Nebraska state Senate eight years ago that would require women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound.
That is incorrect. But it’s a false claim which is being widely echoed, on this site and elsewhere, so it needs to be corrected.
In 2009 anti-abortion forces were pressuring states to pass laws requiring women to undergo ultrasounds. Many states passed such laws. In Nebraska Heath Mello co-sponsored a bill regarding ultrasound which deliberately did not require women to undergo ultrasounds.
I wrote a diary about this yesterday after seeing a number of people on this site repeatedly making the same claim that David Nir is now making, and I stayed up very late last night trying to reply to comments in that thread so I’m a little short on sleep at the moment. Please forgive clunkiness of my writing and any excess wordiness.
First, here’s a link to the text of the bill Mello co-sponsored. I urge people to read the text for themselves. I have, and can attest to the fact that the bill does not require women to undergo ultrasound. Rather, it requires the doctor to give the woman a list of places where ultrasounds can be done (including, and clearly specifying, places which will do it for free), but the choice of whether to have one or not is left to the woman.
The law also states that, if the doctor needs to do an ultrasound prior to the abortion for medical reasons then the doctor must inform the woman an ultrasound is being done and offer her the choice of viewing the screen, but the choice of whether to view or not is hers.
This is very different from how the law is being misrepresented. There were many laws passed which did require women to have ultrasounds; this one does not.
A number of people on this site yesterday were repeating the false claim that Mello favored forced ultrasounds and had co-sponsored a law requiring women to undergo ultrasounds. One source of this misinformation is VoteSmart. VoteSmart is usually a good source, but in this case they screwed up badly. On their page regarding the Nebraska law they give both the wrong title and the wrong summary. (Their summary claims the Nebraska law mandates women must have an ultrasound before having an abortion; the actual law says just the opposite.)
It appears to me they accidentally took the text regarding a different state’s law and put that on the Nebraska page. Fortunately they did post the correct link to the text of the bill. Here the link is again. Please read the bill for yourselves if you doubt what I’m saying.
In the comments to last night’s diary several people quoted from the VoteSmart summary and claimed to be quoting from the actual bill. It was pointed out repeatedly that what they were quoting is not the text of the bill and that the actual bill says the opposite of what the VoteSmart summary says. I think at least one of those people has finally acknowledged their error, but it appears to me that some commenters in David Nir’s diary are still relying on the VoteSmart incorrect summary.
Another commenter in last night’s diary took a passage from the bill out of context and posted that, claiming it was a quote that showed the bill required compulsory ultrasounds. Several of us posted the text that the commenter had left out — whether by accident or design, I don’t know — to show that what the commenter was claiming was false. Again, I urge anyone who doubts what I’m saying to read the text of the bills for yourselves. It should be quite clear to anyone who actually reads the bill that it does not require a woman to undergo an ultrasound.
The National Right to Life press release which Adam B. posts a link to in an early comment about David’s diary looks to me to be a good example of anti-abortion folks spinning creatively. What’s written may be literally true, but the impression people come away with after reading it is not.
They spin the Nebraska law as a victory for their side; actually it was a defeat, in that they wanted to get a restrictive law passed (as they had in other states), a law which would require women to undergo ultrasounds, and instead Nebraska passed a law which did not require women to undergo ultrasounds.
Their press release is a thing of beauty if one is interested in creative ways to make up look like down. One part of the law says that if the doctor needs to do an ultrasound for medical reasons as part of the abortion then he has to let the woman know an ultrasound is being done and he has to set up the screen so that she can look at it if she wants to. But the choice of whether to look at the screen or not is hers. Here’s how NRtL spins that:
What makes the Nebraska legislation stronger than that of other states is the requirement that the abortionist display the ultrasound image thus enabling the mother to easily look at the screen, if she so chooses, rather than having to request that the image be displayed.
Yeah. Other states passed laws requiring women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound. That’s what NRtL actually wanted in these laws. In contrast, the Nebraska law says the doctor must let her know ultrasound is available if she wants one but the choice is hers. But Nebraska law is supposedly stronger because it says that if the doctor needs to do an ultrasound (to see how far along the fetus is in order to determine the best and safest method, for instance, if it’s unclear how far along the pregnancy is) then the woman must be offered the choice of seeing the screen if she wishes to.
No. That’s NRtL spinning. And spinning successfully, by the looks of it, if even someone as sharp as Adam B. didn’t spot the deception.
It’s taken me an hour to type this much so I’m going to post this diary now rather than try to read through more of the comments on David’s diary first. There’s a great deal more misinformation that has been posted but if I try to address any more of it now it will take a while and there’ll be that much more misinformation to address by the time I do post. But I’ll try to answer any questions people have in comments. Please understand, though, that I write slowly and am very short on sleep.