How NH Senate Republicans are Working to Remove Teenage Girls’ Breasts

 

By Cornerstone Action

A group of New Hampshire Republican senators have repeatedly fought to advance a Democrat-sponsored bill to allow teenage girls’ healthy body parts to be surgically removed without parental consent. While this may sound surreal, it is becoming par for the course in a Senate that considers itself fundamentally unaccountable to the Republican base or even to normal people.

On Tuesday, May 26, a committee of conference from both chambers will decide whether this bill will pass as part of HB 1376. While the House has stood strong against the Senate’s efforts, it’s critical to call your representatives and graciously encourage them to remain firm for parental rights. A full list of participants in the upcoming committee of conference is below.

Here’s what happened and what comes next.

What happened

In January, SB 520 was introduced by a partisan bloc of four Senate Democrats led by Senator Tara Reardon. Her bill allowed teenage girl’s breasts to be fully removed for any reason and with no parental consent requirement.

Reardon suggested that her bill was necessary because HB 712, which banned elective breast surgery for minors, had no exception for girls with macromastia—abnormally large breasts causing orthopedic issues. This argument never made any sense. RSA 329:53 II(d) has always contained an exception for “symptomatic macromastia.”

Senator Reardon’s own testimony belied this argument. Reardon described a constituent who had breast reduction surgery as a teenager because, in part, “carloads of boys would drive by my house and scream ‘tits.’” This is not an orthopedic symptom.

When the bill was introduced, many conservatives assumed it had no chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Senate. That was a mistake.

After a perfunctory public hearing on April 8, the chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, Sen. David Rochefort—a Littleton Republican—abruptly took the committee into executive session and advanced Reardon’s bill.

Rep. Lisa Mazur, a Cornerstone-endorsed Goffstown Republican who authored last year’s HB 712 to ban elective breast surgeries on minor girls, led the charge to kill SB 520 in the House. On May 7, the House stood for children and parental rights by tabling the bill. Many conservatives breathed a sigh of relief.

That relief did not last. One week later, on May 14, Reardon and Republican Senator Regina Birdsell hijacked HB 1376, an unrelated parental rights bill by Rep. Lori Korzen of Berlin, and inserted breast-chopping language identical to SB 520.

Cornerstone has no objection to the underlying bill by Rep. Lori Korzen, who is a champion of parental rights and medical freedom. HB 1376 is now a threat only because the Senate bolted on the breast-removal language the House had just rejected.

FAQ

Senate Republicans have publicly made a variety of claims in defense of the bill—none of them true. All the arguments of Senate Republicans can be easily disproven by simply reading the bill.

Senate Republicans say the bill requires parental consent. That is false. No provision of the Senate amendment, and no provision of RSA 329:53, contains a parental consent requirement.

They say the bill is only about breast reduction, not breast removal. That is false. “Breast surgery” is clearly defined in RSA 329:52 to include “surgery to remove all breast tissue.”

They say the bill allows breast surgery only in limited circumstances. That is false. The amendment authorizes “breast surgery” on a minor for any reason, “including but not limited to” “physical discomfort.” In other words, any teenage girl willing to tell a surgeon she is uncomfortable with her body qualifies for full breast removal.

RSA 329:53 already allows limited breast surgery for macromastia. The Senate amendment goes far beyond any honest definition of medical necessity.

Every one of these objections was raised when the House killed SB 520 the first time. Senators were on notice about these problems and voted for Senator Birdsell’s amendment to HB 1376 anyway.

Senate Republicans have also defended themselves by telling constituents that, in the culture of the Senate, senators are expected to defer to the wishes of their party’s committee chair—in this case, Senator Rochefort. This argument ignores the fact that most New Hampshire Republicans elected other Republican Senators, not David Rochefort, to represent them in Concord.

This is part of a much larger pattern in the Senate. This year, Republican Senators removed important protections from HB 1268, a pro-homeschooling bill. They voted to allow state agencies to force pregnancy resource centers to refer for abortions—denying them even the threadbare protections in HB 1416.

Republican Senators also fought to block patients in debilitating pain from accessing experimental therapies, standing alone against a bipartisan majority of the House and the Governor.

Next steps

HB 1376 now heads to a committee of conference. This is where the fight ends. Contact the House members of the committee of conference, thank them for standing strong for children and parental rights, and encourage them to oppose any version of these heinous provisions.

The House conferees will decide whether HB 1376 becomes a vehicle for the surgical dismemberment of teenage girls’ bodies, whether it returns to the parental rights measure Rep. Korzen actually wrote, or whether the bill dies. There is no other compromise that does not end with elective mastectomies on minors without parental consent.

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