Fist Waving Feminism
Posts tagged reproductive rights
ROE V WORLD
Woman Files First Lawsuit Challenging ‘Fetal Pain’ Laws
Source: Jezebel.com
When pro-choice activists warn that restrictive abortion laws harm women in rural areas the most, Jennie Linn McCormack is who they’re talking about. In June, McCormack was charged with having an illegal abortion after police found a fetus in a box in her home that was between five and six months gestation. McCormack says she took abortion-inducing drugs she found online because she didn’t have enough money to get a legal abortion. When she got pregnant she was unmarried and unemployed and making only $200 to $250 a month. She already has three children and couldn’t spend the time or money necessary to travel from her home in southeastern Idaho to Salt Lake City for an abortion. The charges against McCormack were dropped, but now she’s challenging the laws she allegedly violated in what’s believed to be the first lawsuit to argue “fetal pain” restrictions are unconstitutional.
In the past two years, Idaho, Kansas, Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, have banned abortions after 20 weeks, arguing that that’s when fetuses can feel pain. (Anti-choice activists aren’t all that interested in the scientific evidence that this isn’t true.) The Associated Press reports that now McCormack is seeking class-action status in a lawsuit that challenges the idea of “fetal pain” as well as other aspects of Idaho’s abortion law. A judge dismissed the case against her without prejudice for lack of evidence, which means that the prosecutor could refile she charges — unless McCormack is successful in having the laws declared unconstitutional.
Currently abortions in Idaho must be performed by physicians, and second-trimester abortions must take place in a hospital. If a woman causes her own abortion or goes to an unlicensed physician, she can be fined $5,000 and jailed for five years. The lawsuit says that this puts too much of a burden on women who live in rural areas of Idaho where there are no abortion providers. McCormack also argues that the ban on abortions after 20 weeks passed this year violates the Constitution because there’s no exception for abortions necessary to preserve the mother’s life, and it forbids some abortions before the fetus has reached viability. Roe v. Wade established that states can’t prohibit abortions before the age of viability, which other cases have found is between 22 and 23 weeks.
When the law was first passed, Idaho’s attorney general wrote a opinion warning lawmakers that the “fetal pain” measure might be unconstitutional, but they forged ahead anyway. If this lawsuit is successful, McCormack may be able to save herself from prosecution, and help prevent women like her from ending up in such a desperate situation.
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The Ohio House has just passed 54-43 a bill that, if enacted into law, would be the most restrictive abortion law in the country. It’s a deliberate challenge to Roe that would ban abortion after the detection of the first heartbeat. The standard set by Roe is viability. The time at which a heartbeat can be detected varies but can be as early as six weeks, before many women even know they’re pregnant. The bill contains no rape or incest exceptions. (This is the same bill where anti-choicers called a fetus to testify.) Said pro-choice State Representative Connie Pillich on the floor, “The only jobs this bill will create is back alley butchers who are sharpening their knives,” according to Planned Parenthood of Ohio’s Twitter feed. And another representative addressed anti-choice members: “You should feel uncomfortable about this vote. A fetus now has more rights than a woman.” That too, was how constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe put it to ABC when the bill was first introduced: “What they’re doing is trying to push the point at which the woman’s rights are subordinated to those of the unborn to a much earlier point in pregnancy.” Next up: the state senate, the governor’s desk — and if both pass it, the courthouse.
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Well, fuck.
Seriously, fuck this.
Fucking RAGE!
Anger is the appropriate response to this56 notes View comments (via eastofethan & jessicavalenti)
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