After Republican Gov. Pat McCrory issued a veto threat on the North Carolina Senate's extreme anti-abortion bill "unless significant changes and clarifications are made," the state House made some of those changes and reintroduced the bill Wednesday. In doing so, the House followed the Senate's lead in attaching the anti-abortion provisions to a completely unrelated bill and rushing it forward without warning.

Where state Senate Republicans used an anti-Sharia bill as the vehicle for pushing their own form of religious law, state House Republicans found that a motorcycle safety bill was the easiest place to attach the revised anti-choice bill:



The new bill—S353—represents tweaks to the version that passed the Senate last week but still includes some of that version's contentious language. It calls for a physician to be present when the first drug in a chemical abortion is administered, as opposed to all drugs, as the version that passed the Senate last week would mandate. Another major change from the Senate version: Abortion clinics would not be required to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers. But the state Department of Health and Human Services would be authorized to apply those standards as it sees "applicable." The bill also includes a state study to determine what resources are necessary for the state health agency to adequately enforce the new regulations, and would pay for more inspectors.

So North Carolina Republicans won't fund unemployment insurance enough to qualify for added federal unemployment money. But they'll fund a whole bunch of new inspectors to enforce new regulations on a procedure which, nationally, results in complications requiring hospitalization for fewer than 0.3 percent of patients.