State after state, including Ohio, are passing extremely restrictive laws on abortion, hoping that at least one of them will lead to the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Here is what Georgia’s law says .
The law, which bans abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy—or just a week or two after a woman discovers her period is late, let alone that she is pregnant—was enacted Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and will surely be challenged in court.
Calling it a “draconian bill,” Oliver explained that the legislation gives a fetus “natural person” status, allowing it to be entitled to child support, claimed as a dependent on tax returns, and included in Georgia’s population. And the only exceptions to the bill—or the only cases where people would be allowed to have abortions—are due to fatal deformity, if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, or cases of rape and incest (corroborated by police report).
John Oliver brings us up to date on these developments. (If you can’t see the embedded video, click on the above link.)
Does that mean that someone conceived through a rape or incest will no longer be considered a person from now on in Georgia? If they are persons when do they become so? When they are born or when the woman carrying them decides not to get an abortion?
This should make it obvious that the rest of this law is simple bullshit.
Mano, Thank you for not calling them pro-life. There is nothing pro-life about them. Another name I normally use is pro-coat-hanger. They are trying to bring back the use of coat hangers that were popular before Roe v Wade.
mastmaker @ # 2 -- Amanda Marcotte makes a good case as to the outdatedness of the coat-hanger theme.
But she misses an important point brought out by repeated experience in the more Catholic-dominated nations of Latin America: the unwillingly pregnant end up in those dark alleys again, this time seeking drug dealers selling (what they call) misoprostol (known in USA as “the abortion pill”). What could go wrong?
@ Jean:
Even more of a question is what they will do with all the pregnant people who are already in jail? They will essentially be incarcerating without a trial many “natural persons” who have committed no crime. Likewise any pregnant people who are subsequently sentenced to prison (will the fetus get a separate lawyer at trial?).
Ridana,
I agree that there are multitudes of idiocies that follow from this. My point was mainly that the personhood status is totally arbitrary as shown by the exception and is entirely politically motivated.
Jean @1:
Of course the rest of that law and all the other laws placing ridiculous restrictions on a woman’s right to bodily autonomy are simple bullshit. That is all the conservatives have in their attempt to control women. Now that they have placed two more conservatives on the SCOTUS (neither of which should be there), the plan is to get some abortion law on the docket so that Roe v. Wade can be overturned. They have no care for what that will do or how many women will be harmed by it. If they were really anti-abortion, they would favor policies that would actually reduce abortions, such as comprehensive sex education and free contraception on demand. But their whole point is that those slutty sluts that had sex should be forced to have the babies. Never mind that there are men involved who are just as responsible for the unprotected sex, but they shouldn’t be punished because “boys will be boys”.
@2: “There is nothing pro-life about them.”
Indeed, initially I thought that pro-life meant pro-legalized abortion.
The correct name for them is pro-forced birthers.
Not every woman has an interval between periods that lasts exactly a month. It is perfectly normal for a woman to have periods every six or seven weeks. Never mind women with PCOS who have irregular periods even less often than that. It is perfectly possible for a woman to be six weeks into pregnancy and still believing that everything’s fine and her period isn’t late, because she’s expecting it next week. Under this kind of law some women would have to take monthly pregnancy tests just to make sure that they don’t accidentally miss the short window of opportunity during which one can legally get an abortion.