There are always states looking to circumvent a woman's right to choose using infuriating methods like mandatory counseling and wait times, "personhood" amendments, mandatory viewing of sonograms, and even forcing doctors to recite often blatantly false information from a script before allowing the woman to receive an abortion. These are all admitted attempts to make abortion so expensive, inconvenient, and challenging that most women will not be able to go through with their decision to abort.
Now, thanks to the Republican's in Congress, we have to deal nationally with things like the (ironically named) "Protect Life Act" that allows publicly funded hospitals to refuse any care or treatment that they feel might harm the fetus, and it allows them to refuse to provide abortions even in cases where the abortion is the only way to save that woman's life or transfer her to a hospital that will help her. This will effectively nullify the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act for pregnant women in need of lifesaving abortion services.
**The Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, passed in 1986, requires publicly funded hospitals to provide emergency services (abortions included) to anyone who comes through the doors OR they have to stabilize them and transfer them to a hospital that will provide those services.**
Basically, they are admitting that they'd rather watch a woman die than allow her full control over her own reproduction. And that is all it amounts to....because abortion is not the only reproductive choice they want to curtail, Republican also want to eliminate Title X - federal funding that helps low-income women get their yearly check-ups, needed women's health appointments, and birth control; allowing them to stay healthy and have responsible sex lives (gasp!). And their outright disdain for civil welfare programs like Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, etc, shows that once that fetus exits the womb, they couldn't give less of a shit about it.
This Act comes right on the heels of another, even more disgusting measure like House Republicans attempt to redefine rape so that an even smaller margin of women qualified for federally funded abortion.
REDEFINING RAPE!
Luckily, enough people threw a fit about the redefinition that the House GOP retracted it. But the simple fact that they tried.............it's thoroughly repulsive.
And now, to top it all off, South Dakota - one of the hardest places to get an abortion in the entire US - is trying to make killing a doctor who performs abortions TOTALLY LEGAL.
Mother Jones reports:
Ugh. I have a headache. And I need a drink."A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one. "
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