The anti-choice movement has taken a sadistic turn in Georgia, where a new abortion ban, called HB 481, has just been signed by Governor Brian Kemp. Signed into law this Tuesday and due to take effect in 2020, the bill effectively bans abortion outright, declares fetuses to be persons with full legal rights and protections, and imposes prison sentences for women found guilty of aborting or attempting to abort their pregnancies. The bill is misleadingly termed a “heartbeat” bill, and it bans abortions at any stage of pregnancy after the detection of “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity”. But “heartbeat” is a bit is a bit of a misnomer, since the cardiac activity that is first detected in an embryo is not a heartbeat by any stretch of the imagination; what is first observed is the pulsing of cells that are specializing and will eventually become a heart. At this point in the pregnancy, the fetus has no brain and no face. This cellular movement can first be detected at a phase of pregnancy referred to as six weeks of gestation. But this, too, is a misleading phrase. Gestational age is measured not from insemination, but from the beginning of the patient’s last menstrual period. So the bill bans all abortions at four weeks after conception, or roughly two weeks after the woman’s first missed period. This stage of pregnancy is often past before the patient even knows that she is pregnant. This is the idea: to make the logistical, legal and monetary burdens to access an abortion so heavy that most women will not be able to get one. All this is justified by a moralizing, misogynistic and medically arbitrary logic based on a fantasy that wants to equate the movement of cells with personhood. Based on this logic, women who abort their pregnancies – and, probably, some women who have accidental miscarriages – will be treated as murderers under the law, subject to imprisonment and even capital punishment. Those who leave the state for an abortion, or who help others leave the state for an abortion, can be charged with conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. It is tempting to imagine that the law would not be enforced this way, that prosecutors and juries would not enforce a law that forces women to give birth and threatens to kill them if they refuse. But prosecutors have proved themselves zealous in prosecuting women in states where abortion is already de facto illegal. It would be a mistake to underestimate their capacity for cruelty. “Heartbeat” bills are nothing new. They have been signed into law in six states – Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio and now Georgia – just since the beginning of this year. In the past, heartbeat bills were put forth by state legislatures as deliberate legal provocations: they were designed to provoke lawsuits from women’s and civil rights groups that could go to federal court and chip away at the edges of Roe v Wade. They were expensive, experimental, taxpayer-funded misadventures in misogynist litigating that were designed to provoke a lot of controversy, rally the anti-choice movement and eventually get struck down – which most of them were. It’s not certain, but it’s highly likely, that HB 481 will be blocked or delayed by a federal court before it goes into effect on 1 January 2020. For now, it’s still legal to get an abortion in Georgia. Quick Guide What is Roe v Wade? Show Norma McCorvey, pictured, was the real name of the woman known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark 1973 US supreme court case Roe v Wade, which established the right of American women to have abortions. McCorvey became the plaintiff in 1970 after she met with two lawyers looking for a test case to challenge the abortion ban in Texas, where it was a crime unless a woman's life was at risk. Similar statutes were in place in nearly every other state at the time. At the time, McCorvey was pregnant, unmarried, unemployed and unable to obtain an abortion legally or otherwise. The case went to the supreme court, which handed down the watershed ruling that a woman's right to make her own medical decisions, including the choice to have an abortion, is protected under the 14th amendment. McCorvey never had an abortion. Her case, which proceeded largely without her involvement, took too long to resolve, and she gave birth to a child that she placed for adoption. Several years after the ruling, she publicly revealed her identity and became involved in the pro-abortion rights movement. But after a conversion to Christianity, she became an anti-abortion rights activist. Before she died in 2017, McCorvey had said it was her wish to see Roe v Wade overturned in her lifetime. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback. But we are not living under the same legal regime that we were a year ago. The new slew of six-week abortion bans is a direct result of the appointment of the multiply accused sexual assault perpetrator Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court, where anti-choice conservatives now hold a five-four majority and can dismantle or strike down Roe v Wade at any time. Before, these bills were passed by lawmakers who knew they would be struck down, but who wanted to test the limits of Roe, to see how stringent and outlandish a state could make its abortion restrictions and still have those restrictions deemed legal. Now, they are designed to eliminate Roe altogether, and to throw the question of abortion legality back to individual states – many of which will immediately ban it. When Justice Anthony Kennedy (now retired) was on the supreme court, these states had little chance of having outright abortion bans like HB 481 upheld. Now, with Kavanaugh on the court, the door is wide open for misogynist laws to make legal, clinic-based abortion access a thing of the past in large swaths of the United States. To some extent, this has already happened. Since the landmark 1992 ruling Planned Parenthood v Casey, the supreme court has held that states may not impose an “undue burden” on abortion access before fetal viability, roughly 24 weeks gestation. But states have been generous to anti-choice interests in interpreting what burdens on abortion access are undue. They have been able to impose long waiting periods, arbitrary and expensive facility standards for clinics, mandatory ultrasounds, including vaginal ultrasounds, for patients, and mandates that abortion providers read false and misleading statements saying that fetuses can feel pain (which they cannot) and that abortion increases a woman’s risk of cancer (which it does not) or that women who have had abortions exhibit severe psychological ramifications (they do not). They have been able to ban state Medicaid plans from covering abortion and they have been able to keep insurance companies from covering abortion. They have been able to make it too logistically hard, too time-consuming, and far, far too expensive for many women to get an abortion in a medical clinic. This does not mean, however, that abortions are not happening. Instead, self-induced, self-managed abortions are on the rise again in the United States. Before Roe, self-induced abortions were risky, violent and dangerous: women would attempt to pierce their cervixes with knitting needles or coat hangers, and they would puncture organs and suffer infection, hemorrhage and sepsis. Women would drink bleach and poison themselves. Now, self-managed abortions are largely safe and effective, because the face of self-managed abortion has changed. Self-induced abortion no longer looks like a coat hanger; it looks like a pill. Misoprostol, a drug that can be used to treat ulcers but also empties the uterus, is prescribed by abortion clinics as the second of two abortion drugs, along with Mifepristone, which is used first to loosen the lining of the uterus. Mifepristone is hard to find on the black market, because it is subject to tight regulations. But Misoprostol can easily be found on the internet, and it can end a pregnancy on its own; it’s overwhelmingly effective during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, especially for women with an average BMI. The effect of the medication looks identical to an accidental miscarriage; if the patient doesn’t tell anyone she induced, then no one needs to know. However, under the new law, it’s at least possible that Georgia authorities could start treating every miscarriage as a potential homicide. Women who are able to self-induce at home with black market Misopristol might be relatively more safe than their grandmothers who had to use coat hangers and knitting needles. But that doesn’t mean that the cops won’t start asking questions.<doc-sep>Photo: Getty Images Recent media coverage of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, a new law which would make termination illegal before many women even know they’re pregnant, has painted a picture of abrupt, immediate reproductive dystopia. “Abortions after six weeks will now be illegal in Georgia,” reads a representative CNN headline from last Wednesday. By Saturday, some celebrities were going so far as to call for “sex strike,” ostensibly to pressure straight men into caring about their partners’ bodily autonomy. (Women “just cannot risk pregnancy,” Alyssa Milano wrote in a call to action on Twitter, as long as “our reproductive rights are being erased.”) Georgia is one of three states to have passed a six-week ban in the past three months — Ohio and Mississippi came first. This trend is obviously a huge cause for concern: It shows that conservative lawmakers are more confident than ever that they can successfully overturn Roe v. Wade, and it lays bare the astonishing contempt they feel for women. What it does not mean, however, is that women who’ve been pregnant for longer than six weeks in the affected states can no longer get abortions. Amid the media coverage of what the bill might mean for women, one crucial fact has been repeatedly overlooked or downplayed: Georgia’s bill isn’t set to take effect until January 1, 2020, and the two other states with similar laws are set to take effect in July. I say “are set to” because there’s a slim chance any of them will actually be enforced. They all face legal challenges from reproductive-rights groups, and will most likely be blocked by a judge. This is because, in the words of Jennifer Dalven of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, banning abortion so early on in a pregnancy is “flatly unconstitutional.” (The first-ever six-week ban, which was signed into law in North Dakota in 2013, never took effect and was permanently blocked two years later.) “Abortion is legal everywhere,” Dalven told the Cut. “These bans have not yet outlawed abortion, and we expect that we will block them before they do.” In the meantime, the well-intentioned outrage over these laws may be doing more harm than good, misleading women out of exercising their constitutional right to choice. A 2018 survey of people searching online for information about self-terminating found that a full third either didn’t know whether abortion was still legal in their home state, or they thought it had already been banned. It seems this misinformation is now proliferating in Georgia, Ohio, and Mississippi: Providers in all three states say they’ve had patients contact them in a panic, unsure of whether it’s still legal to get an abortion or whether their appointments still stood. “We had a patient call today in tears because … she just passed the six-week mark,” an employee at a Georgia clinic told Vice. “She’s just terrified.” There is a real danger here: By circulating inaccurate information about abortion, we may push desperate women to result to illegal alternatives. But the right to end an unwanted pregnancy is still protected — on paper, at least — in every state. At least for now. This is not to say that these laws don’t pose a legitimate threat. They do, as part of a larger, coordinated strategy to challenge Roe v. Wade. Abortion opponents hope that one of these bills will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, where they’re confident the new conservative majority will rule in their favor. Like the 400-plus anti-choice restrictions passed in the last eight years, the recent rash of six-week bans is an unequivocal attack on the right to choose. But this is not an isolated or momentary crisis; it’s part of a larger, more insidious strategy. Anti-abortion lawmakers have already done everything in their power to make abortion inaccessible to large swaths of the population, forcing women to travel further, wait longer, and shoulder increasingly prohibitive costs in order to obtain essential medical care. All of this is already a reality. The six-week bans are not. But by treating them as a foregone conclusion — something that has or will become law — well-intentioned pro-choicers may be helping the conservative cause, preventing those who can still get safe and legal abortion services from seeking them out.<doc-sep>
The expected vote on a so-called "heartbeat" abortion ban in Georgia is just one of a growing number of abortion restrictions that may become law this year. In fact, more than 250 bills restricting abortion have been filed in 41 states since the start of 2019, according to a new report issued by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group initially formed under Planned Parenthood that has been operating separately for years. While some legislators have been working to restrict abortion access since the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that codified the right to abortion in 1973, the rate at which restrictive laws have been filed in recent years has picked up. Specifically, there has been an increase in the number of so-called "heartbeat" bans, where abortions are banned after six weeks of pregnancy. Opponents of these bills point out that in some cases, women may not know they are pregnant by six weeks, and therefore are unable to obtain an abortion before such laws ban them. Between 2011 and the end of 2018, two states -- North Dakota and Iowa -- signed six-week abortion bans into law, but in the first three months of 2019, an additional two states -- Kentucky and Mississippi -- have already signed similar bills into law according to Elizabeth Nash, the senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute. Abortion rights groups routinely challenge these more extreme restricting laws, and both North Dakota and Iowa's six-week bans were struck down so neither went into effect. Kentucky and Mississippi's new laws have both already faced legal challenges, and neither has taken effect. While no six-week ban has actually gone into effect, abortion advocates claim lawmakers push for "radical abortion bans" as "part of a deliberate strategy" to get legal challenges that could take an abortion case to the Supreme Court, as Nash said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday. Ultimately, Nash claimed, that is part of an effort to "undermine or even overturn Roe." Beyond the push to elevate the issue to the Supreme Court, states are taking other steps to potentially criminalize abortion. The report says six states -- Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas -- have approved so-called "trigger bans," which would ban abortion in the state if Roe is overturned by the Supreme Court. "The surge in attempts to ban abortion in the earliest stages of pregnancy drives home that the end goal of anti-abortion politicians and activists is to ban all abortion -- at any point during pregnancy and for any reason," Nash said in a press release along with the report. The latest push in Georgia is facing a growing choir of opponents as it moves through the state's legislative process. The measure, House Bill 481, passed one vote on March 22, with a vote of 34 in favor and 18 against, and now it proceeds to another House vote, which, if passed, then sends the bill to the governor's desk. That vote is likely to happen on Thursday. One potentially unexpected group that came out against the bill is the Writers Guild of America East and West, which released a statement condemning the "draconian anti-choice measure." The guild said if passed, "this law would make Georgia an inhospitable place for those in the film and television industry to work, including our members." Georgia became a popular state for television and movies to film with a 2008 state tax credit that would award a 30 percent tax break to productions filming in the Peach State. Deadline cites the Motion Picture Association of America as saying the film and television industry is responsible for more than 92,100 jobs and $4.6 billion in wages in the state. "The cost would be most deeply felt by the residents of Georgia -- including those who directly work in the film and television industry, and those who benefit from the many millions of dollars it pours into the local economy," the statement reads. The bill is also facing opposition from some conservative groups, like Georgia Right To Life, which believes the bill doesn't go far enough because it allows exceptions for cases that include rape and incest and where a pregnancy is deemed medically futile, as in the child is not predicted to live to birth or only shortly thereafter. Genevieve Wilson, a director at Georgia Right To Life, told ABC News they view those exceptions as discriminatory.