Abortion laws: The battle over exceptions
The choice for red-state legislators now passing extremist abortion laws is between “cruel and crueler,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. With Roe v. Wade overturned, Republican lawmakers are now making “real-world, and politically dicey choices” about how far to go with restrictions. In Indiana’s state legislature, anti-abortion activists are calling the rape and incest exception a “loophole,” and are heartlessly insisting that to qualify, girls and women have to file police reports “under the penalties of perjury.” Other states’ laws have defined exceptions for the health and the life of the mother in “cramped and ambiguous” language, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. As a result, doctors and hospitals have “legitimate concerns that they will face civil and criminal penalties” if overzealous prosecutors disagree that the patient “had a true medical emergency.” After Texas passed its “heartbeat bill” last year, one woman was denied care after her water broke at 18 weeks, dooming the nonviable fetus; she had to wait days until she had a bloody discharge and a life-threatening infection before doctors intervened.
“Abortion supporters have offered little evidence” that this is a widespread problem, said Alexandra DeSanctis in National Review. If such cases do occur, it’s “the fault of the doctors themselves” for misreading the law. The Texas bill, like “every pro-life state law in the country,” makes exceptions for a woman’s life and health, and it’s up to “a doctor’s medical judgment” whether to induce a premature birth to save a woman. But through “patently false claims” about what the laws say and mean, proponents of “unlimited abortion” are telling misleading horror stories “with the sole aim of undermining pro-life laws.”
“The anti-abortion movement is in denial,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Prominent abortion opponents are now even suggesting “doctors, lawyers, and hospital ethics boards are all collaborating to withhold care from anguished women” to generate propaganda. “Bearing a child remains startlingly dangerous,” said Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. I had two pregnancies that nearly killed me and caused agonizing side effects: uncontrollable itching, hallucinations, diabetes, and liver disease among them. “I know I cannot give birth again,” because I can’t risk leaving “the children I already have and love” motherless. Yet in many states, if I became pregnant again, the decision over what to do would not be mine. How could the life of the mother “possibly mean so little?”