Since 2010, thousands of bills attacking women’s reproductive rights have been introduced in state legislatures, and well over 400 of them have been enacted into law. These run the gamut from attacks on abortion clinics, public funding for low-income patients, and sex education, to laws barring telemedicine, requiring bogus “counseling” for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, installing waiting periods of up to three days, forcing a woman to view mandated ultrasounds of her fetus before obtaining an abortion, and limiting insurance coverage for abortion and contraception.
Campaign ActionThe first quarter of 2019 has been no different, except that the bills being introduced in some states are the most draconian ever. In Texas, for instance, a bill cleared committee this week that would execute people for providing or obtaining an abortion. More about that in a moment.
The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think-tank, explains the more typical kind of proposals being introduced and sometimes passed and signed by Republican governors lately:
- Trigger bans that would automatically make abortion illegal if Roe v. Wade is overturned;
- Gestational age bans that would prohibit abortion at a specific point in pregnancy, such as six, 18 or 20 weeks after the last menstrual period (LMP);
- Reason bans that would prohibit abortion based on fetal characteristics (such as sex, race or disability status); and
- Method bans that would bar providers from performing a specific type of abortion.
But this year a few states have gone even further, pushing bills that amount to near-total bans on abortion, direct challenges to Roe v. Wade, the 46-year-old Supreme Court decision that legalized the procedure in all states and territories.
For instance, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Georgia have recently passed bills to ban most abortions after a “fetal heartbeat is detected.” Eight other states with Republican majorities running the state legislatures have introduced similar legislation. The “fetal heartbeat” proposals are particularly pernicious since the whole notion that a fetus can have a heartbeat before it actually has anything more than a nascent heart is bogus. Typically, this “heartbeat” can be detected at six weeks of gestation, before many women even know they are pregnant. If the new bills are signed by governors in those states, it would bring to 21 the number of states with a “heartbeat” law on the books, even though the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down such laws in North Dakota and Arkansas, and a state judge has done the same in Iowa.