Tennessee abortion law: Effort for narrow exceptions advances in Senate
After weeks of delays, the Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday advanced a bill to add narrow legal exceptions to the state’s total abortion ban on the heels of full House Passage Monday night.
The bill has received bipartisan support in both chambers, though Democrats and doctors have decried changes to the legislation backed by anti-abortion lobbyist group Tennessee Right to Life, which initially opposed any changes to the state’s current abortion ban.
Currently, any abortion performed or attempted in Tennessee constitutes a class C felony. Doctors who perform the procedure to save the life of a patient can argue their case under an “affirmative defense” clause of the law, but health professionals have said for months the criminal and professional risk endangers ethical medical practice and care.
Senate Bill 745 strips the affirmative defense portion from state law and adds explicit exceptions for ectopic and molar pregnancies. The bill also allows abortions performed to save a patient’s life or “to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman” based on a doctor’s “reasonable” medical judgment.
Sponsor Sen. Richard Briggs, R-knoxville, had co-sponsored a previous version of the bill with additional exceptions, which received bipartisan passage out of its first House committee earlier this year.
But Right to Life opposed the legislation, with lobbyist Will Brewer telling lawmakers language about “good faith” medical
judgment, which is included in the current total ban, is too “subjective.” The bill’s progress ground to a halt over the anti-abortion group’s objections, with new language eventually emerging in mid-march that changed “good faith” medical judgment to “reasonable.”
In recorded comments Brewer made to a West Knox Republican Club earlier this month, Brewer said the group opposed the original good faith standard because it would be too difficult to prosecute a doctor if the law was changed.
“It is nearly impossible to prosecute somebody for what they, as an individual, believe was right in the moment,” Brewer said. “I’m not talking about the majority of doctors. I’m talking about a
doctor who makes up a reason to abort a pregnancy when the mother’s life wasn’t really at risk. If that doctor is ever found out and pressed with charges, no DA could successfully prosecute that doctor under this law because you can’t get in somebody’s head in the moment.”
On Tuesday, Briggs, a physician, said he couldn’t explain the legal difference between “good faith” and “reasonable.”
“In the original trigger bill, we used the language ‘good faith medical judgment,’ which I think most physicians would be comfortable with,” Briggs said.
Sen. London Lamar, D-memphis, was the sole member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote against the bill on Tuesday. Lamar said she would have supported Briggs’ initial bill, but she couldn’t support a bill that might only allow an abortion exception when a woman is “damn near on her death bed.”
Lamar has previously spoken publicly about a near-fatal pregnancy loss she experienced several years ago.
“While this little bitty exception might save a few lives,” Lamar said, “it does create more problems than it fixes.”
A number of Tennessee medical groups and individual health care professionals lobbied lawmakers in recent days to preserve the original language of SB 745, and have called for further protections for doctors who terminate pregnancies considered non-viable or with severe fatal anomalies, such as when a fetus’ heart grows outside of its body.
“I have had to explain the diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly, the options for the remainder of the pregnancy and witnessed the heart wrenching grief and sobs that occur as the reality of this news settles in,” Dr. Laura Andreson, a Franklin-based obstetrician/gynecologist, said. “The legislators and public need to fully understand that many desired pregnancies may need to end in an abortion. The current laws have created an environment that makes it a felony to treat many of the common complications of pregnancy.”
The bill is expected to pass the full Senate. Though Democrats have called for broader abortion access, at least some Democratic lawmakers have supported the bill in an effort to add at least some carve-outs to the current law.
Reach Melissa Brown at mabrown@tennessean.com.