VP Harris visits as lawmakers debate Indiana’s abortion ban
INDIANAPOLIS — Vice President Kamala Harris said a proposal from Indiana Republicans to ban nearly all abortions in the state reflects a health care crisis in the country and she met Monday with Democratic state legislators on the first day of a contentious special legislative session on the issue.
Harris traveled to Indianapolis as several thousand people on both sides of the issue filled Statehouse corridors and lined sidewalks surrounding the building as a state Senate committee was set to begin hearing testimony on the GOP-sponsored proposal.
Indiana is one of the first Republican-run state legislatures to debate tighter abortion laws after the U.S. Supreme Court decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade. The ruling is likely to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
“Maybe some people need to actually learn how a woman’s body works,” Harris said Monday, eliciting murmurs and laughs from the Democratic legislators. “The parameters that are being proposed mean that for the vast majority of women, by the time she realizes she is pregnant, she will be prohibited from having access to reproductive health care that will allow her to choose what will happen to her life.”
Indiana House Democratic Leader Phil GiaQuinta said the proposed ban would have “drastic consequences for women, especially for women of color and low-income women, who are already disproportionately impacted by getting adequate health care access.”
Indiana’s Republican Senate leaders proposed a bill last week that would prohibit abortions from the time an egg is implanted in a woman’s uterus with exceptions in cases of rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother. The proposal followed the political firestorm over a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to the state from neighboring Ohio to end her pregnancy.
“She is a baby,” Democratic Rep. Cherrish Pryor of Indianapolis, one of the lawmakers at the meeting with Harris, said of the child. “Why should we force babies to have babies?”
The case of the Ohio girl gained wide attention when an Indianapolis doctor said the child had to go to Indiana because Ohio banned abortions at the first detectable “fetal heartbeat” after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. On Monday, the 27-year-old defendant in that case pleaded not guilty during a hearing in Franklin County, Ohio.
The fate of the Indiana abortion bill in the Republican-dominated Legislature is uncertain, as leaders of Indiana Right to Life, the state’s most prominent anti-abortion group, are decrying the Senate proposal as weak and lacking enforcement provisions.
Republican Senate leaders said the bill would not add new criminal penalties against doctors involved with abortions, but they would face possibly having their medical licenses revoked for breaking the law.
Meanwhile, Tennessee’s attorney general’s office on Monday said it’s still unknown when the state’s anti-abortion “trigger ban” will go into effect, but some state lawmakers are raising alarm that the ban has no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.
Tennessee has been limiting abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy since last month’s ruling.
However, the state has another ban designed to restrict abortion almost entirely. It can’t be enacted until the Supreme Court enters a judgment on the Roe ruling, which is expected soon. Doing so starts the clock on Tennessee’s trigger law and allows it to be implemented within 30 days.
Republican Attorney General Herbert Slatery’s office initially said the state could begin enforcing the trigger law in mid-August, but nearly a month after making that estimate, a spokesperson said they were “not sure” if that timeline was still in place.