Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images
Under a sweeping new law, women in Texas will be virtually unable to get the most common type of second-trimester abortions and legally required to bury or cremate their fetal remains.
On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed several anti-abortion measures into law that further restrict abortion rights, nearly a year after the Supreme Court ruled that much of the state's abortion restrictions were unconstitutional.
The newly passed Texas Senate Bill 8 bans the most common type of second-trimester abortion, dilation and evacuation, or D&E, along with other regulations that abortion rights advocates argue unfairly target patients and make it more difficult to safely get an abortion.
"No state has put together a host of restrictions in one package like this before," said Amanda Allen, the Center for Reproductive Rights' senior state legislative counsel. "It's the most sweeping piece of anti-abortion legislation in this session."
Texas Alliance, a group who helped draft the bill, said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the motivation for the legislation was "to respond to the videos from the Center for Medical Progress that exposed Planned Parenthood's sale and donation of tissues and organs harvested from the bodies of babies who died from elective abortion."
Multiple investigations have not found any evidence that Planned Parenthood sold tissue from aborted fetuses for profit.
Texas is known for enacting strict, sweeping abortion laws that have made it increasingly difficult for the vast state's 5.4 million women of reproductive age to access abortion services.
In 2013, lawmakers passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws known as HB2 that shuttered about half of its nearly 40 abortion clinics scattered across the state. Although the Supreme Court struck down much of that law last year, only three abortion clinics have reopened, according to the Associated Press.
Texas Tribune / Via texastribune.org
Banning the D&E surgical procedure, which abortion rights and medical groups say is the safest and most accessed, effectively eliminates second-trimester abortions in the state.
That means women who might not have had access to a clinic or could not afford to travel hundreds of miles to get one until about 12 weeks could no longer have an abortion, Allen explained.
The new law bars women from getting a D&E procedure even if she was a victim of rape or incest, allowing it only in cases of a medical emergency.
Courts have blocked similar laws aiming to effectively ban second-trimester abortions in Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma due to challenges from abortion rights groups and the ACLU.
Map showing open abortion clinics in Texas and nearby states.
Fund Texas Choice
And while a woman won't be prosecuted for getting a now-illegal abortion procedure, her doctor will. Under the new law, any physician in Texas who performs such a procedure could go to jail.
But as Democratic Rep. Joe Moody points out, the loose wording could be interpreted as anyone involved in the process of helping a woman get a banned abortion could be imprisoned, such as a friend who drove her to the clinic or a boyfriend who helped her pay for it.
Clinics are also mandated to bury or cremate any embryonic and fetal remains, which abortion rights advocates say could result in even more facilities closing due to increased costs.
"These regulations mean they might have to work with third-parties, like disposal companies, to keep their doors open," Allen explained. "Such burdens could force more remote ones to close." However, the law does include a "burial or cremation" assistance provision that could help alleviate some of the costs.
Joe Pojman, Texas Alliance for Life's executive director, said the purpose was to require the "humane disposition of the bodies of babies" and ban the "grinding and flushing in a sewer system and incineration and burying in a landfill."
However, cremating or burying fetal tissue does not improve or benefit public health, according to the Texas Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which argued last year that it "could become a cruel mandate on a woman who is experiencing the grief and trauma of losing a very wanted pregnancy."
Women who have abortions are also not allowed to donate fetal tissue for scientific research, another rule that rights advocates say unfairly stigmatizes women who get abortions. A woman who had a miscarriage has the choice to do so.
Texas' renewed battle against abortion reflects an intensified effort nationwide to crack down on clinics and limit access to abortion services.
In Missouri, Republican Governor Eric Greitens just announced a special legislative session next week aimed at imposing stricter regulations on abortion clinics and targeting a law in St. Louis that he says made it an "abortion sanctuary city."
"It's a crusade against a woman's right to a safe and legal abortion," Allen said. "This is about stigmatizing. It's never really about women's health and safety."
LINK: Trump Told Planned Parenthood To Stop Providing Abortions In Order To Keep Its Funding
LINK: Experts And Anti-Abortion Groups Are Both Worried About How The GOP Health Care Bill Covers Abortion
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/2sF2K9r
No comments:
Post a Comment