Planned Parenthood Action Fund Launches Six-Figure Ad Buy in Maine on Susan Collins’ Failures to Protect Safe, Legal Abortion
For Immediate Release: July 16, 2020
New digital ad highlights how Sen. Collins has endangered safe, legal abortion by voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court
WATCH Full Video: Susan Collins Was Wrong
Portland, ME — Today, Planned Parenthood Action Fund is launching a six-figure digital ad campaign that reminds Mainers that Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) cast a deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh and encourages them to call on her to stop supporting judges who put safe, legal abortion at risk. Collins promised Mainers that they could trust Justice Kavanaugh to protect their reproductive rights when she voted to confirm him to a lifetime Supreme Court appointment. Instead, in last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down a medically unnecessary abortion restriction in Louisiana, Kavanaugh voted against access to safe, legal abortion.
Statement from Sarah Standiford, national campaign director, Planned Parenthood Action Fund:
“Susan Collins was warned by Mainers that Brett Kavanaugh couldn’t be trusted to protect their reproductive health and rights, but she failed to listen. Now, Justice Kavanaugh is on the Court, and he voted against safe, legal abortion the first chance he got. Instead of listening to Mitch McConnell, Collins should have listened to the people of Maine.”
The new ads underscore the absurdity of Collins’s claim that Kavanaugh would honor the court’s precedent as insurance that he would not restrict access to reproductive rights. Instead, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that he would overturn the court’s precedent from just four years ago, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the court struck down an identical abortion restriction to the Louisiana one the court declared unconstitutional last month. These ads ask Mainers to call Collins and remind her that they do not support judges that put safe, legal abortion at risk.
In the end, Collins’s deciding vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh and her support for Trump’s other Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, brought the Supreme Court within one vote of putting safe, legal abortion out of reach for millions. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are just two of the more than 150 Trump-appointed judges that Collins has confirmed.
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Planned Parenthood Action Fund is an independent, nonpartisan, not-for-profit membership organization formed as the advocacy and political arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The Action Fund engages in educational, advocacy and electoral activity, including grassroots organizing, legislative advocacy, and voter education.