NJ Advocacy 2020: Our Path Forward

Innovative Parenting Advocacy NJ (IPANJ) is hosting a New Jersey 2020 advocacy training to help guide New Jersey advocates as we enter into the 2020 Legislative session.  

NJ advocates were successful in keeping the Religious Exemption (RE) elimination legislation off the table in the 2019 session. As of January 14, 2020, the new RE removal bills were reintroduced, therefore NJ advocates must remain vigilant. Bills S902/S903/A969 re-introduced in January 2020, are documented to not only remove your religious right to deny medical mandates, but it also includes verbiage that would effectively allow the state government to judge and qualify doctor recommendations to abstain from specified vaccinations for medical reasons.  Essentially, the state government would have the right to interfere with the doctor patient relations and advisements. 

The goal of this advocacy training is to provide an overview of the skills necessary to be an active medical freedom acdovate in New Jersey.  We will review topics such as how to navigate the NJ Legislative website, how a bill becomes a law in NJ, how to sign up for bill alerts, how not to get burnt out as a NJ advocate, to how to Tweet your representatives on Twitter!        

Please register and indicate if you are available to attend in-person or remotely via a zoom call link. If you plan to attend via zoom, a link will be sent to you to register on Sunday evening.  

Bills S902/S903/A969 is catastrophic, and if passed will make New Jersey the fifth state to fully remove religious rights to reject mandatory vaccination.  The difference is that New Jersey’s bill to remove religious exemption to mandatory vaccination is deemed the most aggressive and barbaric of all the bills passed to date in other states.  There is zero consideration for students with IEP’s, no grandfathering, the rollout will be effective state wide across all education and child care center facilities, and institutions of higher education—whether private, public or religious.  Because the reach of this bill extends to New Jersey colleges and universities, to date, an estimated 38,000 students will be denied a right to an education in the state if the bill is passed into law.  

In order for this bill to become law, it must pass 4 arms of the state legislative body: Assembly Health Committee, Full Assembly, Senate Health Committee, Full Senate.  Once it has passed these four channels, it then would go to desk of Governor Murphy, and his signature would be required to pass the bill into law.  Governor Murphy also holds the power to veto the bill, or to send it back to the legislative body for amendments.

Senator Sweeney has a personal goal to pass this bill in this legislative session.  He has been hard at work, strong arming and greasing his fellow legislative peers to switch, swap and flip their votes to YES in order to accrue the 21 votes he needs to pass this bill on the Senate floor. 

And because of this, we, as NJ Advocates, must remain vigilant! We are MAKING A DIFFERENCE. We are defending our rights, our children’s rights and the rights of our fellow citizens. Let's gather to inspire one another as we face the fight of our lives in 2020!   

We, the people of New Jersey, demand that our rights — including the right to make informed vaccine decisions AND right to make decisions for ourselves and our families — be safeguarded.   Together, we will STAND in solidarity to strategize how best to advocate for our parental, religious and medical freedoms in New Jersey!