Georgia’s new Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act prohibits abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, but it will not imprison women who have abortions or miscarriages. Hollywood celebrities like Alyssa Milano and other columnists have spread misinformation about Georgia’s new law. The legislation bans abortions once the fetal heartbeat is detected, usually at six or seven weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is endangered. 7) So fuck on! Yes! We’ve earned our right to sexual pleasure. But remember, they’re also trying to take away our access to birth control. If you get pregnant & exercise your right to choose your own destiny & healthcare, you may be thrown in prison. #SexStrike #SorryNotSorry — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) May 13, 2019 The new law, however, will not imprison women who have abortions or miscarriages, as some have described: “Women could get up to 30 years in prison for having a miscarriage under Georgia’s harsh new abortion law,” wrote Grace Panetta at Business Insider. “In addition to banning abortion after a heartbeat can be detected, the law’s personhood provisions would seem to allow for women who perform their own abortions, travel out of state for an abortion, or are found to be responsible for a miscarriage to be charged with murder,” she said. “Women Who Have an Abortion in Georgia Could Soon Be Sentenced to Life in Prison,” reads a Glamour headline. However, abortionists and attackers who would attempt to harm a woman’s unborn child are the focus of the new legislation – not the women themselves. David French at National Review explained how the thinking of many pro-abortion rights individuals is “fundamentally wrong”: “The heartbeat bill did not repeal a number of Georgia criminal statutes that explicitly apply to abortions and unborn children, and it does not overrule controlling legal authority holding that these statutes bar prosecution of a woman for terminating her own pregnancy,” he wrote, walking through some of the key statutes that apply to unlawful abortions: If a person performs an abortion in violation of the heartbeat bill, then Code Section 16-12-140 applies. It does not impose life imprisonment on anybody, and Georgia courts have held that it does not apply to a woman who self-terminates, only to third parties who perform an abortion. … [T]he Georgia code section that criminalizes “feticide” (such as when a man attacks a woman for the purpose of killing her unborn baby) specifically states that “nothing in this Code section shall be construed to permit the prosecution of . . . any woman with respect to her unborn child.” “Taken together, these statutes mean that a woman cannot be prosecuted either for aborting her own baby or committing feticide,” French concluded, adding that the Washington Post also fact-checked claims that the Georgia bill criminalized women who terminated their own pregnancies and found them to be “incorrect.” “Georgia law is clear,” he wrote. “While abortionists can be prosecuted for performing unlawful abortions — and an attacker can spend the rest of his life in jail for killing a woman’s unborn child — Georgia’s heartbeat bill cannot be used to prosecute a woman for ending her own pregnancy.” Nicole Russell, columnist at the Federalist, also wrote about Milano’s spread of misinformation. Cool. Be extremely careful. If you get pregnant and miscarry, and they can’t prove you didn’t miscarry on purpose, you can get thrown in jail for a long time in Georgia. #SexStrike — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) May 11, 2019 “She should educate herself on Georgia’s specific statutes before tweeting nonsense,” Russell wrote, once again stressing than punitive measures would be taken against abortionists who defy the law and those whose intention is to attack the mother’s unborn baby. Though the abortion lobby and its political allies are fond of narratives that portray the pro-life movement as “misogynists” and engaged in a “war on women,” the pro-life community has never condemned women in unplanned pregnancies. BREAKING: Misogynists in Alabama just passed the most extreme anti-choice measure in the country—a TOTAL ban on abortion. This incredibly dangerous attack on reproductive freedom is now headed to the governor’s desk. #HB314 #ALPolitics pic.twitter.com/t1wzwRQNME — NARAL (@NARAL) May 15, 2019 Alabama just passed a near-total ban on abortion. No exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors could face 99 years in prison for providing abortions. This is a war on women, and it is time to fight like hell. https://t.co/lhwlbyeQsl — Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) May 15, 2019 “The focus of the bill was securing the personhood and legal rights of the unborn, not punishing women who are pregnant and unsure of what to do,” Russell said. “Even though Milano attempts to portray conservative politicians in Georgia as lacking compassion and empathy for mothers, this is a baseless smear,” she added. “The ban doesn’t actually impose any kind of life imprisonment on anyone—the maximum is ten years—particularly not a mother who might try to induce a miscarriage or abortion.”<doc-sep>The rape and incest exceptions are perverse. If an early developing embryo is fully human, as the state asserts, why isn’t an individual produced by a crime entitled to the same protections as anyone else? And will a woman be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was raped, perhaps in a criminal long trial, before being permitted to abort, or is an accusation of violation sufficient grounds to allow the procedure to go forward?<doc-sep>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.<doc-sep>
On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a “fetal heartbeat” bill that seeks to outlaw abortion after about six weeks. The measure, HB 481, is the most extreme abortion ban in the country—not just because it would impose severe limitations on women’s reproductive rights, but also because it would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty. The primary purpose of HB 481 is to prohibit doctors from terminating any pregnancy after they can detect “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity,” which typically occurs at six weeks’ gestation. But the bill does far more than that. In one sweeping provision, it declares that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” that deserves “full legal recognition.” Thus, Georgia law must “recognize unborn children as natural persons”—not just for the purposes of abortion, but as a legal rule. This radical revision of Georgia law is quite deliberate: The bill confirms that fetuses “shall be included in population based determinations” from now on, because they are legally humans, and residents of the state. But it is not clear whether the bill’s drafters contemplated the more dramatic consequences of granting legal personhood to fetuses. For instance, as Georgia appellate attorney Andrew Fleischman has pointed out, the moment this bill takes effect on Jan. 1, 2020, the state will be illegally holding thousands of citizens in jail without bond. That’s because, under HB 481, pregnant inmates’ fetuses have independent rights—including the right to due process. Can a juvenile attorney represent an inmate’s fetus and demand its release? If not, why? It is an egregious due process violation to punish one human for the crimes of another. If an inmate’s fetus is a human, how can Georgia lawfully detain it for a crime it did not commit? But the most startling effect of HB 481 may be its criminalization of women who seek out unlawful abortions or terminate their own pregnancies. An earlier Georgia law imposing criminal penalties for illegal abortions does not apply to women who self-terminate; the new measure, by contrast, conspicuously lacks such a limitation. It can, and would, be used to prosecute women. Misoprostol, a drug that treats stomach ulcers but also induces abortions, is extremely easy to obtain on the internet, and American women routinely use it to self-terminate. It is highly effective in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Anti-abortion advocates generally insist that they do not want to punish women who undergo abortions. But HB 481 does exactly that. Once it takes effect, a woman who self-terminates will have, as a matter of law, killed a human—thereby committing murder. The penalty for that crime in Georgia is life imprisonment or capital punishment. It is entirely possible that Georgia prosecutors armed with this new statute will bring charges against women. HB 481 would also have consequences for women who get abortions from doctors or miscarry. A woman who seeks out an illegal abortion from a health care provider would be a party to murder, subject to life in prison. And a woman who miscarries because of her own conduct—say, using drugs while pregnant—would be liable for second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 30 years’ imprisonment. Prosecutors may interrogate women who miscarry to determine whether they can be held responsible; if they find evidence of culpability, they may charge, detain, and try these women for the death of their fetuses. Even women who seek lawful abortions out of state may not escape punishment. If a Georgia resident plans to travel elsewhere to obtain an abortion, she may be charged with conspiracy to commit murder, punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment. An individual who helps a woman plan her trip to get an out-of-state abortion, or transports her to the clinic, may also be charged with conspiracy. These individuals, after all, are “conspiring” to end of the life of a “person” with “full legal recognition” under Georgia law. It is entirely possible that Georgia prosecutors armed with this new statute will bring charges against women who terminate their pregnancies illegally. In 2015, a Georgia prosecutor charged Kenlissia Jones with murder after she self-terminated; he only dropped the charges after concluding that “criminal prosecution of a pregnant woman for her own actions against her unborn child does not seem permitted.” Starting in 2020, however, Georgia law will permit precisely this kind of prosecution. There is no reason to doubt that history will repeat itself, and more prosecutors will charge women who undergo abortions with murder.