Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith said Monday that legislation to establish a sex-education grant program for teens and to update New York’s abortion statutes are priorities for the now-Democrat-controlled chamber.

Smith’s pledges represent a policy shift from the former Republican majority, which blocked the bills from a vote by the full Senate. The Democrat-led Assembly passed the Healthy Teens Act each of the past four years, but the Senate did not. The abortion legislation was proposed by then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2007 and was introduced in the Senate, but it has not passed either house.

Smith told hundreds of reproductive-rights activists at the Capitol with Family Planning Advocates Monday that the state’s abortion laws are “outdated.” Family Planning Advocates is the legislative arm of Planned Parenthood.

“We have to bring these laws up to the 21st century,” he said.

With the slim majority Democrats hold, they would need some Republicans to vote with them to be successful on the two measures. There are 32 Democrats and 29 Republicans, with one Senate race in Queens still unresolved. The GOP incumbent is expected to win.

The state Catholic Conference and New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, a Christian lobbying group, are among the organizations that oppose the legislation. Spitzer requested the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act soon after a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a federal law that restricts abortions in certain cases. It prohibits them when a partially delivered, largely intact fetus is removed (intact dilation and evacuation, which has been called partial-birth abortion), but not when a fetus is removed in pieces (dilation and evacuation) or when there isn’t vaginal delivery.

State Health Commissioner Richard Daines, a physician, told Family Planning Advocates that Gov. David Paterson supports the Reproductive Health legislation and comprehensive sex education in the state.

The abortion bill would make it a fundamental right for women to make medical decisions on contraception and pregnancy, something not currently in state law. It would ensure that health is a primary concern in regulating abortion, and it would remove all references to abortion from the state penal code.

The Healthy Teens Act would set up a grant program through the state Health Department to teach “age-appropriate and medically accurate” sex education. School districts, boards of cooperative educational services, school health centers and community-based groups could apply for funding.

Source: Poughkeepsie Journal