Today, the Arkansas state legislature overrode Governor Asa Hutchinson’s (R) veto of the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, a bill prohibiting doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, surgeries or other treatments to children for the purposes of helping them live as the opposite sex.
Hutchinson defended his veto as consistent with the conservative principle of limited government. However, after override votes of 71-24 in the state House and 25-8 in the state Senate, the bill will now become law.
In response, Jon Schweppe, director of policy and government affairs for American Principles Project (APP), released the following statement cheering the result:
“Arkansas’ passage of the SAFE Act today is a resounding victory for biological sanity and common sense. As most Americans recognize, we should not be pressuring young children into undergoing highly experimental, life-altering procedures to ‘change’ their sex before they are even old enough to make most other major decisions. State lawmakers are right to slam the brakes on the ideologically driven campaign to push children into this risky pathway.
“It is unfortunate that the law’s passage had to come over the veto of Gov. Hutchinson. While the governor claimed he was acting out of a conservative concern for restraining government, restraint is not always a good thing. The governor himself admitted that it was important for the state to act to protect life in preventing ideologically motivated doctors from performing abortions. The same principle obviously applies in this case as well, and we are grateful the legislature had the courage to act to protect the health and well-being of children.”
Read Original Article on AmerikcanPrinciplesProject.org
HB1570: Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act
HB1570
