RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a Republican-backed bill Friday that would have banned providers from performing abortions because of a fetus's race or possible Down syndrome diagnosis.
The bill will now head back to the Legislature, where the Republican-led General Assembly could vote to override that veto.
Though the move was widely expected, Republicans' reframing of the bill as a civil rights issue could make it more difficult for some moderate Democrats — particularly those who hail from culturally conservative districts — to follow the governor's lead and vote against the bill.
House Bill 453, known as the Human Life Nondiscrimination Act/No Eugenics, is the first of its kind to make its way through the state Legislature here. The introduction of it placed North Carolina among the ranks of states across the country that have championed Down syndrome-related abortion legislation in recent years, a strategy that some North Carolina Democrats have spoken out against.
The legislation has made its way through numerous discussions, debates and floor votes as the newly conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court gears up to review a Mississippi law banning abortions beyond 15 weeks. That decision could impact abortion access across the country, including in North Carolina.
And the bill made it to Cooper's desk around the same time a federal appeals court struck down a lower court ruling upholding North Carolina's 2019 law to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy — a sign that Republicans have lost the abortion restriction battle, for now.
Republicans could take back a win, although likely temporary, by overriding Cooper's veto, making the restrictions law without his signature.
To do that, about two Democrats in the Senate and three in the House would need to vote with Republicans in favor of the abortion restrictions.
That's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but it's unlikely: Several Democrats voted with Republicans to support the bill — possibly enough votes to override a veto in the House, but not the Senate.
"This bill simply put an end to eugenics," state Sen. Amy Galey, a Republican from Burlington, said in a press release Friday in response to the veto. "It shouldn't be controversial to protect an unborn child with Down syndrome, but Gov. Cooper proves once again that he's unwilling to stand up for North Carolinians when his left-wing donors demand his loyalty."
The majority-Republican Legislature has sought to implement a flurry of abortion restrictions in recent years, all of which Cooper has vetoed since taking office in 2017.
But lawmakers have previously come close to overriding Cooper's abortion vetoes. With the help of one Democrat, the state Senate overrode the governor's veto of the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Act, which would criminalize providers who don't give life-saving care to infants that survive an abortion.
The House was unable to garner enough Democratic votes to do the same that year.
Republicans' approach this year is different, though.
State Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Republican from Kernersville, has pointed to laws that prevent discrimination based on race or disability in educational and judicial systems and in the workforce.
"Yet babies with the same characteristics can be aborted, simply because of their race or their disability," Krawiec said. "This is eugenics in its worst form. This Human Life Non-Discrimination Act will end this atrocity."
Testifying numerous times in response to the bill, Disability Rights NC responded saying "forcing people to carry a pregnancy to term does nothing to advance the rights of people with disabilities."
In several debates, Democratic lawmakers argued that Down syndrome-selective abortions isn't eugenics, which, in North Carolina, has taken the form of state-sponsored, forced sterilization of women.
Over more than four decades, the state forcibly sterilized more than 7,600 people, with the most recent cases occurring in 1974. Many were Black.
"It's quite disturbing that you would connect eugenics to this abortion view," said state Rep. Carla Cunningham, a Democrat from Charlotte, in a committee hearing.
Other Democrats, though, voted with their Republican colleagues regardless of the framing.
State Rep. James Gailliard, a Democrat from Nash County, called Republicans hypocritical for framing the bill as eugenics-related.
"It's an insensitive titling of the bill at a minimum," Gailliard said. "For them to transfer that language and make it about abortion is a real stretch, a real insensitivity."
Gailliard, a pastor, was one of six House Democrats to vote in favor of the bill. No Democrats voted in favor of the bill in the Senate, though one lawmaker who has historically sided with Republicans on abortion issues was absent.
