Q: When is an abortion ban not a ban?
A: When it’s dressed up as a 12-week limit.
“They’ve dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it’s really not,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. The GOP-controlled legislature, suddenly with supermajorities in both houses can, with no defections, pass SB 20 over Cooper’s expected veto.
“It will effectively ban many abortions altogether because of the obstacles they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors,” Cooper told host Margaret Brennan. “This bill has nothing to do with making women safer.”
No more than Republican-sponsored “election integrity” measures are about safeguarding elections.
“North Carolina has become an access point in the Southeast,” he told Brennan. “And what this legislation is going to do is going to prevent many women from getting abortions at any time during their pregnancy, because of the obstructions that they had put here. Many of these clinics are working very hard to treat women, and now they’re going to have many new medically unnecessary requirements that I think many of them are going to have to close.”
The devil is in the details. Under SB20, “patients who discover at 25 weeks that their fetus is developing without lungs or a brain, for example, would be forced to carry a non-viable fetus to term – an utterly barbaric barrier,” warns the nonpartisan advocacy group Carolina Forward:
Moreover, for women who do encounter abnormalities before 25 weeks, SB 20 dictates a long series of condescending and moralistic requirements euphemistically termed “informed consent.” Section 90-21.81D of SB 20 stipulates that doctors must tell women about the “unpredictable and variable lengths of life” with the abnormalities at stake, even if this is not medical fact. The doctor must offer referrals to multiple forms of (expensive) care to encourage her to continue with the pregnancy. The doctor must make a full report to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Carolina Forward counts off the bureaucratic hurdles Cooper referenced:
- Requiring a consultation with a physician 72 hours before an abortion to be in person, not over the phone or remote.
- Requiring 3 separate visits to a doctor’s office for obtaining a medication abortion. Only 1 of these actually involves giving the medication.
- Requiring any abortion after the 12th week of pregnancy to take place in a hospital, instead of any outpatient facility. (This involves much higher costs and additional staffing and scheduling issues.)
- Inventing brand new licensure requirements for abortion facilities, with a long list of onerous fees, and a requirement that they be annually renewed. Those requirements will likely match those for ambulatory care centers, like emergency rooms, and would effectively close every abortion clinic in North Carolina.
We’ve seen this “find the ban” shell game before in other states. It’s not in the 12 weeks. It’s elsewhere in the bill. Originally the “Safe Surrender Infants/Safe Sleep Prog. Funds” bill, SB 20 became the “Safe Surrender Infants” bill, then the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act,” then finally just “Abortion Laws” as it grew from 11 to 47 pages.