BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Lawmakers won’t try to override Gov. Bobby Jindal’s veto of a bill that sought to set up regulations governing surrogacy births in Louisiana.
Rep. Joe Lopinto, R-Metairie, told his House colleagues Sunday he wouldn’t ask for an override vote, saying he didn’t have the support needed in the Senate.
He said he believed he had the votes needed in the House, but he didn’t want lawmakers to make the “difficult” vote against the governor if he didn’t believe he could be successful in overriding the veto.
“At the end of the day, the governor’s going to win this war,” Lopinto said.
A day earlier, Jindal vetoed the bill that would have set out the legal rights of adoptive parents, child and surrogate mother when a woman carries and gives birth to a baby for someone else. The governor cited concerns raised by “many in the pro-life community.”
A veto override takes a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate. The surrogacy bill didn’t get two-thirds support in the Senate when it passed. Lawmakers rarely override a governor’s veto in Louisiana and have never overridden one of Jindal’s bill rejections.
Louisiana law has few regulations governing surrogacy. It isn’t illegal in the state, but contracts between a couple and its surrogate aren’t enforceable in court. The woman who gives birth is presumed to be the child’s mother.
The issue of creating a regulatory framework for surrogacy in the state was a personal one for Lopinto and the bill’s co-sponsor, Sen. Gary Smith, D-Norco. Lopinto and his wife used in-vitro fertilization to become parents. Smith has two children with his wife through surrogacy.
Jindal vetoed a similar bill last year because of moral and ethical objections raised by social conservatives and religious leaders. Since then, Lopinto worked with the groups on what he was told was compromise language that removed many of their objections.
But the Louisiana Family Forum, a powerful conservative organization at the Capitol, urged Jindal to veto the measure, even after the group suggested it didn’t oppose the bill and worked with Lopinto and Smith on the language this year.
Gene Mills, president of the Family Forum, said in a statement that he had concerns the bill would allow some embryos to be destroyed and would sanction unmarried women becoming pregnant as surrogates.
Mills said the bill “dramatically redefines the institution of family in Louisiana. The ethical and moral dilemma created by these contracts makes this bill, at best, morally questionable.”
The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed the measure because the church opposes surrogacy and in-vitro fertilization. But the bishops didn’t ask Jindal for a veto.
Lopinto thanked the bishops and said others involved in negotiations didn’t keep their word.
“That was absolutely broken in this case,” he said.
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Online:
House Bill 187 can be found at www.legis.la.gov
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