Seemingly everyone at last week’s Louisiana Republican Party gathering in Lafayette was celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.
But few people knew about the pioneering role to stop abortion in Louisiana played in the early 1990s by a white-haired man in their midst who is now a Republican elder statesman.
His name is Woody Jenkins, and in 1990 and 1991, he sponsored bills as a state representative from Baton Rouge to ban abortion in Louisiana, aiming to achieve the grander goal of overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It took a gubernatorial veto to block one bill from becoming law.
Jenkins, 75, is now editor of the Central City News, a monthly newspaper mostly devoted to conservative causes. At the convention, he toted a tripod everywhere he went and used his cell phone to livestream the speeches and panels in Lafayette on his newspaper’s Facebook site.
A conservative Democrat at the time, Jenkins sponsored a bill in 1990 that would ban abortion, allowing an exception only for the life of the mother.
"If we cannot protect unborn children, we really are not a civilized society," Jenkins said at a 1990 anti-abortion rally on the steps of the State Capitol.
In a recent interview, Jenkins said he authored the 1990 measure at the urging of then-Attorney General Billy Guste, a Democrat and devout Catholic, who believed that passing a strict anti-abortion bill in Louisiana would be declared unconstitutional by a lower court but that that ruling would be appealed and might give the Supreme Court the opportunity to reverse the Roe decision.
Key to the legal reasoning, Jenkins said, was that the bill must contain no exceptions for rape or incest.
“If you pass a bill with exceptions, you’re adopting the premise that an unborn child is not a legal person,” he said. “So you wouldn’t be able to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Jenkins had high hopes because he knew that most lawmakers were anti-abortion, and then-Gov. Buddy Roemer as a congressman had supported federal legislation to amend the Constitution to ban abortion with no exceptions.
But Roemer opposed Jenkins’ bill. Nonetheless, the Legislature passed his measure, with then-Sen. Mike Cross, D-Baker, pushing it through the Senate. Roemer vetoed the bill.
Jenkins returned with a similar measure in 1991. This time, however, his bill stalled in the Senate. The Legislature, however, did pass a bill by then-Rep. Sammy Theriot, D-Abbeville, that banned abortion but allowed exceptions for rape and incest.
Jenkins spoke against Theriot’s bill and voted against it.
“It feels good and is designed to rally the troops,” Jenkins said recently. “But it doesn’t go to the core of the issue to stop abortion.”
The Legislature passed the bill, and Roemer vetoed it. But this time, lawmakers, but not Jenkins, overrode the veto, the first time that had ever happened in Louisiana.
The courts struck down the legislation.
Jenkins continued to lead the fight against abortion in the following years. He became a Republican in 1994, narrowly lost a 1996 race for the U.S. Senate to Mary Landrieu, didn’t run for re-election to the state House in 1999, lost two other races for office, co-chaired Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Louisiana in 2016 and has spent the past decade chairing the Republican Party in East Baton Rouge Parish.
Jenkins believes his efforts in the early 1990s helped lay the groundwork for the recent Supreme Court ruling, which he said “was a victory for the Constitution and the rule of law. It was a victory for countless children who will now have an opportunity to live.”
The Roe decision, he added, “has been a curse on this country for nearly 50 years, that we as a country allowed to happen. I’m sad that so many lost their lives. We’ll never know the contributions of those who were lost.”
Advocate Library Manager Judy Jumonville contributed research for this report.