By demanding both financial concessions and an end to collective bargaining for his state's public-sector unions, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker is pushing a far-right agenda, labor groups and Democrats say. Walker won't negotiate with union leaders, and has even dismissed ideas from other Republicans in the GOP-controlled state senate. But Walker has a history of striking hard-line positions, and nowhere is that more true than on the most controversial social issue of them all: abortion.
Walker's nearly nine-year record in the Wisconsin Assembly, the legislature's lower house, reads like a pro-life handbook, an all-out assault on abortion rights. What's more, the many anti-abortion initiatives he backed are perfectly in sync with the assault on reproductive rights now unfolding on the national level, where House Republicans recently gutted funding for Planned Parenthood and controversially tried to redefine "rape" to limit the long-standing exceptions to the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or to save a mother's life.
Walker, the son of a minister, attended Marquette University in Milwaukee from 1986 to 1990, where he served as chair of Students for Life. He dropped out of the school without graduating in 1990, and unsuccessfully ran for the Assembly that fall. He ran again in 1993 in a special election and won an Assembly seat representing Wauwatosa, a city just outside of Milwaukee. It didn't take long for him to take up the abortion fight.
In November 1996, Walker and Assemblywoman Bonnie Ladwig R-Caledonia announced plans to introduce a bill banning "partial-birth" abortions, or what's medically known as dilation and extraction. Anti-abortion groups have condemned the practice, but groups that back abortion rights argue the procedure could save a woman's life in the case of severe late-term complications during a pregnancy. Walker said partial-birth abortions are "never needed" to save lives, adding, "This procedure is not a medically recognized procedure." (NPR has a good explainer of the procedure here.)
rest at http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/wisconsin-scott-walker-abortion
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