If you open up Instagram and look at people’s stories, you’re sure to see lots of re-posted outraged tweets and political cartoons about Alabama and Georgia’s recent abortion laws. But there has been a lot of confusion about what these bills actually do and how they punish women or doctors for having abortions.
There are currently 6 states who have passed “heartbeat” laws that ban abortions after the detection of the fetus’ heartbeat, after about six weeks of pregnancy. These states are: Kentucky, Ohio, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Iowa (although the Iowa law was later struck down by a state judge). Alabama’s law is particularly alarming because it makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Alabama’s law does not punish women for having abortions, but it does punish doctors with up to 99 years in prison. Georgia’s law, however, includes the provision that fetuses have full legal rights as a human being. Parents would be able to claim fetuses on their tax forms, for example. But since fetuses are considered humans, that means that it’s possible for women or doctors who perform abortions to be charged with murder. Many circulating social media posts have stated that women who miscarry due to using drugs or other dangerous activity could be charged with second-degree murder, or even be charged with conspiracy to commit murder for leaving the state to get an abortion.
It’s hard to tell whether women would actually be prosecuted for these actions, and Planned Parenthood Southeast CEO and President Staci Fox said that “The news headlines and social media headlines that speculate about the bills’ unintended consequences are – at the very least – not productive. At most, they’re harmful.” On the other hand, women have already faced consequences and investigations after miscarriages. In New York, a woman who wasn’t wearing her seat belt and miscarried during a car crash was sentenced to nine years in prison for endangering the fetus before a court overturned the sentence. In 2018, a woman in Indiana was charged with feticide for using drugs during her pregnancy that lead to her giving birth to a stillborn. Imagine being heartbroken after the miscarriage of a baby that you desperately wanted and then having law enforcement officials question you about the causes and circumstances of the miscarriage. This will probably make women less likely to call 911 or contact their doctors if they begin to miscarry or have severe health complications. Black women are already 3-4 times more likely to die from pregnancy related complications than white women, and laws like these could make the situation even worse for our country’s most vulnerable people.
One of the biggest and scariest consequences of these abortion laws would be the rise in illegal and unsafe abortions. No one wants to return to days of coat hanger and back-alley abortions. (Roosevelt’s production of Spring Awakening last year was an emotional reminder of this.) It seems unlikely that women will stop having abortions after these laws take place, and instead they will probably have to resort to desperate measures. This is ironic for a policy meant to protect life. And while wealthy women may be able to leave the state or pay for a safe, secret abortion, this will not be the case for those less fortunate. 49% of women who get abortions live under the poverty line so these are often the women who need safe access to abortion the most.
Ohio also recently introduced a law banning public-sector insurance coverage of “drugs or devices used to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum,” which many reproductive-health advocate are worried would include birth control methods like IUDs and the pill. The state representative who introduced this bill has stated that “When you get into the contraception and abortifacients, that’s clearly not my area of expertise,” yet continues to write the bill. He also discussed coverage of a procedure to re-implant an ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy outside the uterus that can be very harmful to women and is usually removed with medication or surgery) in a women’s uterus, despite the fact that that procedure does not exist! It is very strange that Ohio is trying to reduce access to birth control considering that easy access to birth control is the reason for our historically low abortion rates according to the CDC. Republican men seem to believe that birth control causes abortion when it simply prevents pregnancy from happening (often by preventing ovulation). These laws make Ohio’s abortion bills seem less like an effort to protect fetuses (which is a reasonable opinion to have) and more like an attempt to control women’s lives. Being against abortion and also against birth control is like being against fires and also against large buckets of water. If pro-life activists promoted sex education, birth control, and welfare for poor single mothers, their measures to stop abortion would be a lot more convincing.
