California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday unveiled a multi-state ad campaign to fight proposals in several Republican-controlled states that he said aim to ban out-of-state travel for abortions and related medications.

The six-figure ad campaign and an online petition will launch Monday, starting with a TV ad targeting a bill being considered in Tennessee. There, eight Republican male state lawmakers are the leading co-sponsors of bills that would create a crime of “abortion trafficking,” making it a crime for adults to help minors obtain an abortion or medications to end premature pregnancies without parental consent or legal guardians. The bills would also allow civil lawsuits for the “wrongful death of an unborn child who was aborted.”

Similar legislation is pending in several states that have banned or severely restricted abortion, including Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama. Newsom plans to tackle them with RightToTravel.org, an effort paid for by a national political action committee he launched last spring with $10 million from his state campaign funds. He has said the effort, dubbed the “Campaign for Democracy,” is intended to boost Democrats and counter a radically conservative Republican agenda.

“We cannot allow Trump Republicans to hold women hostage,” Newsom said in a press release announcing the campaign. “These abortion travel bans are another sick and twisted attempt by the far right to control women and deprive them of their freedom. We have to fight back.”

a

The lead sponsor of one of the bills in Tennessee, Republican state Rep. Jason Zachary, has said his intent is to protect the rights of parents to decide on medical procedures involving their children. He noted that children should not receive aspirin or COVID-19 vaccinations without parental consent.

“This bill is intended to protect the rights of parents … to ensure that no adult preys on a vulnerable minor who may be pregnant,” Zachary said during a hearing last week.

2/21

Zachary also said the bill is not intended to restrict interstate travel, an area of ​​federal jurisdiction that he said Tennessee law does not control, but only the transportation of minors within Tennessee.

Tennessee is among the states that have banned abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with few exceptions, meaning most pregnant people who want an abortion have few options in the state.

Opponents of the “abortion trafficking” bill say the intent is to close off the ability to obtain an abortion in states where abortion rights are protected, and one of Zachary’s Republican colleagues echoed that understanding at the hearing.

Zachary faced critical questions from Democratic lawmakers, who noted that sometimes the most trusted adults in a young person’s life are not parents, but grandparents or other relatives, teachers, nurses or ministers, who could be subject to a crime because they were trying to help them with an unwanted situation. pregnancy.

Newsom’s new ad, titled “Hostage,” portrays a tearful young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed with a “sexual assault evidence collection kit” on a nearby table. She screams for help.

“Trump Republicans want to criminalize young women who travel to get the reproductive care they need,” the narrator says. “Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage.”