It’s bad
How long before rape is decriminalized? After all, it’s really an opportunity:
That’s Ohio. In Oklahoma, 6 weeks means that most women won’t know if they are pregnant before it’s too late to get an abortion in Oklahoma:
Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma passed a bill on Thursday that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, typically around six weeks into pregnancy and before many even know they are pregnant.
The Oklahoma Heartbeat Act will take immediate effect as soon as Gov. Kevin Stitt signs the bill, which is expected as early as Friday. Stitt has committed to signing any anti-abortion legislation that comes across his desk and has previously described himself as America’s “most pro-life governor.”
Earlier this month, Oklahoma enacted a different bill that nearly totally bans abortion except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Under that bill, anyone who performs an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. It will take effect in August unless barred by the courts.
The new bill, which was passed without debate or any questions allowed, is modeled after a Texas law that went into effect last year. It has exceptions for cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered, but not for cases of rape, incest, or fetal conditions that make life unsustainable after birth. It also imposes additional reporting requirements on physicians and allows private individuals to seek civil penalties, including at least $10,000 in damages, against anyone who aids in or performs an abortion after the six week term. That’s designed to circumvent current legal limitations on the government’s ability to go after abortion providers.
“It’s identical to the bill that was enacted by the Texas Legislature last year, and that bill has passed muster with the United States Supreme Court,” Tony Lauinger, the chairman of Oklahomans for Life, told the AP. (The Supreme Court, however, never held a full hearing on the bill and merely dismissed a case challenging the bill in a brief order without explaining its reasoning.)
“We are hopeful that this bill will save the lives of more unborn children here in Oklahoma as well,” Lauinger added.
Abortion advocates challenged the bill in the Oklahoma Supreme Court late Thursday, arguing that it prevents Oklahomans from accessing constitutionally protected abortion care.
“For those able to scrape together the necessary funds, [the bill] will force them to travel out of state to access abortion care. Others will attempt to self-manage their own abortions without medical supervision. And many Oklahomans will have no choice but to continue their pregnancies against their will,” they write in the lawsuit.
It’s the latest in a series of anti-abortion laws passed in Oklahoma and in several other GOP-controlled state legislatures that make it all but impossible to obtain an in-state physical abortion, even while the US Supreme Court’s precedent in its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade still stands.
The court will decide a case by early July in which it is expected to partially or completely overturn Roe, which recognized a pregnant person’s fundamental right to seek an abortion, but found that states could still impose restrictions on the procedure in the service of protecting the pregnant person’s health and the potential life of a fetus once it can survive outside the womb. But even if the court doesn’t overturn Roe, the latest Oklahoma bill will likely still stand given that legal challenges to the parallel law in Texas have failed.
Many Texans have flocked to Oklahoma abortion clinics after their state’s heartbeat act went into effect in September. There are just four such facilities across the entire state of Oklahoma, which have seen soaring demand in the months since.
It isn’t just abortion. Look how these laws are affecting the medical treatment of miscarriage:
An early draft of a Missouri bill seemed to outlaw treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, which happens when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus; it read:
The offense of trafficking abortion-inducing devices or drugs is a class A felony if: (1) The abortion was performed or induced or was attempted to be performed or induced on a woman carrying an unborn child of more than ten weeks gestational age; (2) The abortion was performed or induced or was attempted to be performed or induced on a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy.
According to the Mayo Clinic, “An ectopic pregnancy can’t proceed normally. The fertilized egg can’t survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.” The Missouri bill has since been amended, and though the bill’s author told The Columbia Missourian that the original text was misinterpreted, the “muddy” nature of the language in some of these documents is part of what concerns women’s health advocates.
“Make no mistake, these laws have a chilling effect on the ability to practice safe obstetrics,” said Dr. Courtney A. Schreiber, the chief of the division of family planning in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “These laws put physicians in an impossible position of having to balance regulations that don’t take into account the complexity of pregnancy and an actual person’s urgent need to sustain their health,” she told me. When these laws must be applied “in real life to real doctors taking care of real women, the language doesn’t translate, the sentiment doesn’t translate. The level of confusion and fear is intense for physicians practicing obstetrics in states with these restrictions,” she added.
As The Associated Press’s Lindsay Tanner noted, medical students are already being affected by anti-abortion legislation. Abortion training is not available at medical schools in Oklahoma, and “bills or laws seeking to limit abortion education have been proposed or enacted in at least eight states,” Tanner reports. Since the surgical procedure that’s performed to end a missed miscarriage is the same as the one that’s performed in an abortion, fewer doctors trained to do this procedure, known colloquially as a D. and C., will mean fewer options for miscarrying women.
The Texas law and laws like it set up a situation where “anybody who experiences a pregnancy loss that they can’t explain to the satisfaction of law enforcement becomes suspicious,” Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at If/When/How, a legal organization that works for reproductive justice, told me.
“This is a lawyerly point, but the idea that if it is a crime to have done something to have ended that pregnancy, that becomes a jury question. You have to put a person through a trial to determine whether a loss was ‘innocent,’” she added.
Diaz-Tello mentioned the confusing case of Lizelle Herrera, a Texan who recently “was arrested and charged with murder — over what local authorities alleged was a ‘self-induced abortion,’” according to The Washington Post. Texas’ law “explicitly exempts a woman from a criminal homicide charge for aborting her pregnancy,” as The Post notes. The charges were ultimately dropped and the county district attorney apologized, The Post reports, but what is clear is that this woman was put through a painful and terrifying situation because of this new law.
I asked both Schreiber and Diaz-Tello what women who live in Texas and other states with restrictive abortion laws can do to protect themselves should they suffer a miscarriage. If you are fortunate enough to have a choice of obstetric providers, Schreiber recommended interviewing clinicians about how they handle miscarriages, and making sure to choose someone you feel could help you navigate the process in a way that respects your autonomy. Though no one wants to think about a wanted pregnancy ending in a loss, having as much information as possible, in advance, about what your treatment options might be is another important step.
But many women don’t have these resources — according to the March of Dimes, about 38 percent of rural counties and 58 percent of urban counties are considered “maternity care deserts,” which means they have no access to hospital-based obstetric services. Black women in rural areas are particularly vulnerable.
Diaz-Tello said that being informed about your rights is important. If you have, for example, taken pills to end a pregnancy when that is not legal, you are not required to tell a doctor that you have done so. If/When/How also has a free, confidential legal help line if you have questions about your rights.
It’s appalling to me that the onus should be on a woman who is experiencing a miscarriage to avoid potential prosecution, but that’s where we are. Politico recently published an article suggesting that many Americans are under-informed about the scope and speed of the changes already happening. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2022 legislative sessions, 33 abortion restrictions have been enacted in nine states, and a stunning 536 restrictions have been introduced in 42 states. A Democratic operative told Politico, “Most voters still haven’t connected the dots to the looming federal change and mistakenly think Roe is almost untouchable.” This misconception needs to be corrected right now.
Maybe the Democrat could say something about it? Just spit-balling here.