Spenser Heaps, Deseret News People rise in a standing ovation after a resolution adopting an official anti-abortion stance for the Riverton City Council was passed during a City Council meeting at City Hall on Tuesday, May 7, 2019.
RIVERTON, Utah — The City Council passed a pro-life resolution Tuesday night, after some heated public comment but then a standing ovation by others in the room.
Some in the crowd said it was not the city’s business to wade into abortion talk. But others thanked the city council for taking a stand.
“It’s not changing city ordinance, it’s not changing state law, it’s just saying that the city council agrees with trying to protect human life,” said the resolution’s sponsor, city councilwoman Tawnee McCay.
“It is expressing our city’s and majority of our cities’ view that we want to protect the unborn,” she said.
The resolution passed with 3 city council members in favor, one abstaining and one absent.
The left-leaning Alliance for a Better Utah spoke out against it.
“This is a wildly inappropriate insertion of council members’ personal beliefs into a municipal body,” read their statement.
But McCay believes other cities will follow their example.
“I didn’t want it to just be an anti-abortion, I really wanted it to be about how do we help decrease the number of women that are in the situation that they have an unplanned and maybe unwanted pregnancy,” McCay said.