Submitted by Sean Goldrick, Riverside
Maya Angelou once said, ““When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” Hard-right GOP state senator Ryan Fazio is now trying to pretend that he’s pro-choice, claiming in a recent mailer that he is “committed to keeping abortion legal in Connecticut.” But in an essay he published in “The Federalist” in 2018, he showed who he really is- an anti-abortion extremist. Fazio wrote that the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision was “offensive to the rule of law and to millions of informed and motivated voters.”
During the 2020 League of Women Voters debate in Greenwich, when asked his views on women’s reproductive rights, Fazio stated that the rights of Roe v Wade were codified in Connecticut state law, and that wouldn’t change. He did not say, nor has he ever said, that he supports a woman’s right to reproductive choice laid out in Roe. He just said “it won’t change.”
All six currently serving Republican Supreme Court justices said the same thing during their confirmation hearings: Roe is “settled law,” it’s “precedent.” It won’t change. But at the first opportunity, those GOP justices reversed themselves and eliminated American women’s right to abortion. Fazio, who has never renounced his statement that Roe is “offensive to the rule of law,” can’t be trusted to defend women’s reproductive rights any more than those Republican Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe.
After Republican supreme court justices destroyed Roe, Republican-controlled states across the nation began implementing legislation that effectively outlawed abortion. Texas’s SB 8 bill, for example, outlaws abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, approximately 6 weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period. Technically, abortion remains “legal” in Texas. But in reality, permitting abortion only up to 6 weeks, long before most women know they’re pregnant, means that abortion is effectively illegal. So when Fazio claims that he supports “keeping abortion legal in Connecticut,” he’s really saying he supports an early cut-off for abortions that, while keeping abortion technically “legal,” makes abortion effectively “illegal.”
Fazio’s vote on a bill this spring revealed again that he is an anti-abortion extremist. After the effective criminalization of abortion in Texas, women across that state began traveling to other states seeking abortions. But part of that Texas law permits bounty-hunting vigilantes to turn in to Texas authorities for prosecution women seeking abortions outside the state and people who assist them. The Connecticut legislature passed a bill this spring (HB 5414) that prohibits state officials and medical authorities from providing information to other states attempting to prosecute women seeking abortions in Connecticut and those assisting them. Fazio voted against the bill.
He’s now attempting to justify his “no” vote by claiming he only objected to a section of the bill that would permit non-physician clinicians to perform non-surgical (aspiration and medication) abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. He insists he was attempting to preserve “high health and safety standards for abortion.” He’s lying. In fact, as state senator Dr. Saud Anwar, MD, stated during debate, the Connecticut Department of Public Health, American Public Health Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists all supported permitting non-physician clinicians to perform those procedures. Indeed, 15 other states already permit non-physician clinicians to perform those procedures. So Fazio’s “no” vote was nothing but a pretext. His real objective was to make abortions for Connecticut women and women coming here from other states more difficult to obtain, slowing women’s access, while giving free rein to anti-abortion vigilantes from other states to prosecute women seeking abortions here.
After winning his state senate seat in a special election in 2021, the anti-abortion organization, Family Institute of Connecticut, congratulated Fazio, stating, “We see in Ryan Fazio’s (The Federalist) article what his opponents see in it: a man who is, at heart, pro-life.” That organization also awarded Fazio a perfect score on its legislative scorecard this year.
Fazio gave further proof he’s an anti-abortion extremist just a few days ago when he attended a fundraiser in Greenwich to support the virulently anti-abortion Republican candidate for governor of Michigan, Tudor Dixon. Dixon supports Michigan’s suspended 1931 law making it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion, punishable by four years in prison. She also supports requiring women and girls made pregnant by rape to carry their rapists’ fetuses to term.
Fazio ducked the League of Women Voters’ Greenwich debate. But he showed up at the League’s debate in New Canaan. At that debate, his Democratic challenger, Trevor Crow, stated her strong support for amending the Connecticut constitution to enshrine Roe v Wade. Fazio, however, made clear that he does not support a state constitutional amendment to protect women’s reproductive rights.
Ryan Fazio is desperately trying to pretend he’s not the anti-abortion extremist he really is. But Fazio showed us who he is in 2018 when he called Roe v Wade “offensive to the rule of law.” As Maya Angelou admonished us, we should believe him the first time.