Women in Idaho with severe pregnancy complications are now somewhat less likely to die due to not being able to obtain an abortion, thanks to Judge Jason Scott who issued a ruling Friday that broadens the state’s teeny tiny, barely perceptible medical exception to include patients who are at death’s driveway rather than death’s door.
The ruling will allow doctors to perform abortions even when death “is neither imminent nor assured” if their “good faith medical judgment” tells them that a patient faces a risk of dying “at some point” without an abortion. Prior to the ruling, doctors could have faced a felony for performing an abortion in that situation.
“Pregnant Idahoans whose health is in danger shouldn’t be forced to remain pregnant, and we are glad the court recognized that today. But this decision leaves behind so many people, including some of the women who brought this case,” said Gail Deady, a staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, on Friday. “No one should have to choose between carrying a doomed pregnancy against their will or fleeing the state if they can.”
The law still won’t allow abortions for fatal fetal anomalies — because it’s more important that people unrelated to the situation have an opportunity to “witness” a miracle than it is to not force people to give birth to babies that will either die on their way out or live for a few hours in excruciating pain. It also will not allow exceptions for patients who doctors believe will be at serious risk for suicide if forced to give birth to a dead baby.
On Monday, the Texas Senate will debate SB33, a bill to ban taxpayer funds from being used to fund “abortion assistance entities” or to directly support those going out of state to obtain abortions.
This is likely in response to cities like San Antonio and Austin setting up their own funds to assist those who need to leave the state for an abortion, as well as providing funds to groups like Jane’s Due Process and Sueños Sin Fronteras that provide logistical and travel assistance to abortion patients.
Importantly, SB33 provides a new definition of “abortion provider” that could have far wider implications. Right now, when Texas law refers to an “abortion provider,” it is referring to an actual facility where abortions are performed. This law changes that definition to “a person who performs or induces an abortion,” which would include those who self-manage their abortion, putting them at risk of criminal prosecution. Remember when they weren’t going to do that? (I don’t, because they were always going to do that.)
Lawmakers in a dozen states — Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — have recently introduced bills that will cause abortion patients to be charged with murder. (A crime that, in many of these states, is punishable by death.)
While mainstream anti-abortion rights activists spent years promising they’d never do such a thing, usually trying to cast abortion patients as victims of evil, abortion-loving con artists out to trick them into killing their precious children, there is a growing faction of “abortion abolitionists” who desperately want to see women who have abortions held criminally liable.
We would all surely be very shocked by this, probably, if every argument against abortion did not inevitably turn into someone hysterically screaming about how “the sluts must be punished!”
But they do. They always, always do.
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