Nebraska: A Pro-Life State?

 

by Marilyn Moore

"Nebraska is a pro-life state.”  This statement has been proclaimed often by our governor, Pete Ricketts.  Most recently, I heard him make this assertion in an interview with Nebraska Public Media reporter Fred Knapp earlier this week.  He said this in reference to the bills that have been introduced in the legislature that would further restrict women seeking access to abortions, in defiance of the present (but perhaps not-for-long) boundaries established by the US Supreme Court nearly fifty years ago.  When the reporter asked him about the description of Nebraska as a pro-life state, in light of a 2014 poll from the Pew Research Center that showed that 50% of Nebraskans favored abortion in all or most cases, and 46% opposed abortion in all or most cases, the governor dismissed the poll, and went on to say that there are other ways that Nebraskans are pro-life, citing the experiences of neighbors helping neighbors in times of disaster, such as floods, or tornados, or the pandemic.  

This is not a blog about abortion, though that may be my topic at some time in the future.  This is, instead, a musing about what a pro-life state looks like, if we go with the Governor’s statement for the moment that pro-life is not limited to the topic of abortion.  

It seems to me that in a pro-life state, elected leaders would be at the front of the movement to protect people in a pandemic.  They would do that with the megaphone that is theirs alone, because no one gets more media attention than elected officials.  They would also do that with specific attention to laws and policies that promote, rather than inhibit, evidence-based practices to counter the pandemic.  What do we see in Nebraska?  

The first, best practice we had as a nation, before vaccines were developed, was a face mask, and every public health official continues to say it’s a valid and important practice in reducing spread of the virus.  Our governor has resisted every effort by public health leaders at the local level to require this public health best practice.  The State Attorney General, with the governor’s support, has just sued the Public Health Director in the city of Omaha for the mask mandate she implemented this past week, as cases and hospitalizations there have sky-rocketed in the past month.  He has relentlessly criticized the Mayor of Lincoln and the Public Health Director in Lancaster County for mask mandates.  He asserts that local officials may not make these decisions, that they must have permission from the Nebraska Department of Health to do so.  (Not such a champion of local control in this situation, I guess.) I’m not the expert on the statutes regarding the relationship between local public health departments and the state, but it seems to me that if there are statutes prohibiting local officials from making the best decisions possible for the residents of their cities and counties, a pro-life state, and Governor, would be about the business of changing those laws.  If there are differences between Lancaster County and Arthur County, and there are, then why shouldn’t local experts have the authority to make the decisions that protect the lives of their residents?  If we were a pro-life state, we would place a high priority on those decisions that protect lives.

Speaking of the lives of residents, I believe that anything else, anything other than Covid 19, that killed 160 Nebraskans in a two-week time period (January 1 to January 14) would get elected leaders’ immediate attention.  In all of 2021, 220 Nebraskans died of automobile accidents; more than half that many died in two weeks from Covid 19.  And yet, legislators are introducing bills that would prohibit the implementation of public health safety measures, like masks, vaccinations, and testing.  If we were a pro-life state, we would not be looking at legislation that hinders, rather than helps, public efforts to protect lives.

While the governor has said, on several occasions, that he thinks people should be vaccinated, he has resisted every effort, at every level, to require the vaccination that every public health official and epidemiologist has said would be the most helpful step in controlling this virus.  Indeed, Nebraska was one of the states that sued to stop the federal mandate for vaccinations in workplaces, which our governor described as a “breathtaking example of federal overreach.”  The US Supreme Court agreed, determining that Congress had not granted that much authority to the federal agency.  Could be; my purpose here is not to argue that decision, though I’d like to.  But if the law is what the court says it is, then wouldn’t a pro-life governor of a pro-life state be urging Congress to authorize life-saving practices in the time of a pandemic?

And about overreach….on the day that Governor Ricketts described the federal agency’s efforts to mandate vaccines as overreach, he issued a directed health measure aimed at a private, non-profit, medical center in Nebraska, directing that they cease all elective surgeries, because they had moved to Crisis Standards of Care.  It must be awkward to be governor in a state with  world-renowned infectious disease specialists, who know the science and speak the science and advise on best practices in public health, when you as the governor don’t really want to implement those best practices.  So when the medical center, with those world-renowned infectious disease specialists, implements Crisis Standards of Care, it pretty much says we’re in a crisis, and that in spite of the governor’s assertions that Nebraska came through the pandemic just fine, without mandates, and that businesses stayed open and children stayed in school, the fact is, hospitals are full and over-full, and the next surge  is still in front of us, and of course doctors and medical centers will have to make decisions about who of those people lined up in the emergency room are going to be admitted to an ICU for covid care.  That’s what a crisis looks like.  And on top of all of this, that medical center is now being told by the governor how to make that decision.  Those are hard decisions to be made; I am confident the health care providers and their leaders have the information, the judgment, the wisdom, the head and the heart, to make the best decisions possible when there is no good decision.  I would think a pro-life governor in a pro-life state would want to help and support those professionals, not second guess them.  To those professionals, his directive might look like….overreach.

Putting aside all policies, regulations, laws, etc., I would think a pro-life governor in a pro-life state would use his bully pulpit, intentionally, deliberately, repeatedly, to urge public health best practices.  Our governor has said on repeated occasions that Nebraska doesn’t need mandates, because Nebraskans will do the right thing.  He has also said that vaccination is the right thing to do.  Yet, from the county map on the Nebraska Department of Health Covid Dashboard, just over a third of the counties report a vaccination rate of more than 50%, and only two, that’s right, two out of ninety-three counties, have a vaccination rate of 70% or higher.  And those are the two counties that the governor repeatedly criticizes for leadership shown by public health officials.  The governor barn-stormed the state last year, drumming up opposition to the proposed federal 30 by 30 voluntary conservation plan.  He’s speaking in multiple stops across the state again this week, promoting his legislative initiatives.  Clearly, he believes that being in local communities across the state is an effective way to communicate what’s important.  Where’s the barnstorming tour promoting vaccines, urging people to do the right thing, to take action to save their own lives and the lives of others?  I suspect that the majority of those counties with a vaccination rate below 50% voted for this governor; isn’t the pro-vaccine message an important one for them to hear, too?  Again and again?  It is, after all, a pro-life message.

In a pro-life state, where every life is important, we would recognize, affirm, and celebrate the connectedness of our lives.  Our pro-life governor would remind us that it’s not just for our individual benefit that we wear a mask, or get vaccinated, or quarantine if we have a positive test.  It’s for all the other lives that we touch, too, literally or figuratively.  Teachers and students are protecting each other.  Health care workers and patients are protecting each other.  Retail clerks and customers are protecting each other.  Those providing and those receiving governmental services are protecting each other.  We would recognize that the 2941 Nebraskans who have died of Covid as of January 15 are not 2941 isolated deaths.  Left behind are children and spouses who mourn, friendship circles that have a missing chair, businesses and workplaces that struggle to replace expertise, and lives and stories that ended way too soon.  In a pro-life state, where every life is important, we are all the poorer because of 2941 lives lost.  

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