Get them out of our wombs!
Arizona lawmakers gave final passage to three anti-abortion bills Tuesday afternoon, including one that declares pregnancies in the state begin two weeks before conception.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to prohibit abortions after the 18th week of pregnancy; a bill to protect doctors from being sued if they withhold health information about a pregnancy that could cause a woman to seek an abortion; and a bill to mandate that how school curriculums address the topic of unwanted pregnancies.
The 18th week bill includes a new definition for when pregnancy begins. All of the bills passed the Senate and now head to Gov. Jan Brewer (R) for her signature or veto. Passage of the late-term abortion bill would give Arizona the earliest definition of late-term abortion in the country; most states use 20 weeks as a definition.
A sentence in the bill defines gestational age as “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” which would move the beginning of a pregnancy up two weeks prior to conception.
Elizabeth Nash, states issues manager for Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization in Washington, said the definition corresponds with how doctors typically determine gestational age. She said since the exact date of conception cannot be pinpointed, doctors use the day of the woman’s last menstrual period to gauge the duration of a pregnancy. The method does not provide an exact date.
“It will have some impact, from what we understand there are abortions provided at that point in Arizona,” Nash said. “It will reduce access.”
Nash said nationally, 1.5 percent of abortions in the U.S. occur after the 21st week and 3.8 percent occur between the 16th and 20th weeks. She said the bill would violate U.S. Supreme Court rulings on abortion by mandating a cutoff date that is before viability and not having enough provisions for late-term abortions needed to protect a woman’s health.
State Rep. Kimberly Yee (R-Phoenix), the bill’s sponsor, was not immediately available for comment. Her assistant said that Yee, a former aide to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), was voting on the House floor.
State Rep. Matt Heinz (D-Tucson), a physician, said he did not want the state to set the gestational age since science could not provide a precise one. “I imagine it will be a legal dispute. How can a judge determine gestational age?” Heinz said. “If medical science can only determine gestational age to within 10-14 days, how can a superior court judge do it?”
The other two bills passed by the House include the state’s “wrongful birth, wrongful life” bill that prohibits lawsuits against doctors who do not provide information about a fetus’ health if that information could lead to an abortion. In addition, parents cannot sue on the child’s behalf after birth.
The third bill requires that schools teach students that adoption and birth are the most acceptable outcomes for an unwanted pregnancy.
All three bills are now headed to Brewer’s desk for her review. The governor has not announced a position on the bills, which is her practice, but her spokesman indicated that Brewer has a long commitment to pro-life issues.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/az-abortion-bills-arizona-gestational-age_n_1415715.html
2 eggs, sunny-side up can now be construed as Cruelty to Animals, no?
God save us from Conservatives trying to save us from ourselves…If I had the choice of being saved by a Conservative and being damned, I think I’ll take my chances with damnation..
“It’s no longer IOKIYAR….It’s OK If You’re A Republican, but IOKBYAR–It’s OK BECAUSE You’re a Republican.” — Me
in the name of consistency, Arizonians will now be pronounced dead two weeks in advance of their actual dying.
The Daily Beast, By Allison Yarrow, April 12
Despite its name, critics derided the Women’s Health and Safety Act that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law today as cruel, dangerous, and hostile to women—likely to deter many Arizona women from seeking an abortion, and to distress those who nonetheless go through with one.
Life starts earliest in Arizona, which now defines gestational age as beginning on the first day of a woman’s last period, rather than at fertilization. In practice, that means the state has banned abortions after about 18 weeks (20 weeks from the last menstruation) except in the case of medical emergencies. While that provision has been much discussed, abortions after that point account for only about 1 percent of the procedures currently performed.
The stipulation likely to be most widely felt is what experts are calling an effective shutdown of medication abortions. These nonsurgical abortions are usually performed within the first nine weeks of pregnancy, and account for between 17 and 20 percent of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights advocacy group. While women often take the pills at clinics and in their homes, the bill now mandates that a medical provider must have hospital privileges within 30 miles of where the procedure takes place. Many times clinics or homes are not within 30 miles of hospitals, and the distance prevents providers from other cities or even states from caring for women, says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute. Another factor that could contribute to what Nash called a “shutdown” of medication abortions is that the law requires abortion pills to be administered using outdated protocols, confusing providers and obscuring proper use of the drugs.
While it becomes the seventh state to pass such legislation in the past two years, many Arizonans believe theirs is the most restrictive and sinister because of the degree to which it will legislate health care, thwart evidence-based medicine, and shame women. One in three women will have an abortion before age 45 according to Guttmacher, and more than half of those women already have a child.
Not All “20-Week” Bans Are Created Equal: A Closer Look at How Abortion Bans Diverge from Medical Protocol and Put Women at Risk
RH Reality Check, By Robin Marty, April 11
One of the most recognized accessories of the expecting mother is the “pregnancy ticker.” It’s that little timeline that she often puts on her facebook page, her personal website, baby page, or home page of her computer that shows where she is in her pregnancy during the long 40 weeks waiting to give birth. Some provide developmental facts. Some explain how big the baby is compared to fruit. Some just tell you how many days you are likely to have left before you get to welcome your baby into the world.
Being pregnant is like having your own alternate timeline from the world. Your life is suddently counted off in weeks. You learn for the first time that really, a pregnancy is ten months long, not nine. You discover that no one really has a definite consensus as to when the first trimester ends.
And yes, by the time you actually ovulate, you are already two weeks pregnant.
Fetal and embryonic age is something that often gets exchanged and played with when it comes to anti-abortion tactics and law. When trying to prove developmental milestones, anti-choice advocates often swap post-fertilization age for gestational age in order to make it appear as if the pregnancy is much more advanced than it actually is. But to the medical community, pregnancy is defined at gestational age, calculated from the first day of a woman’s last menstrual period (LMP). Because early ultrasounds aren’t a standard part of prenatal care (unless you want to end a pregnancy and a legislator decides to force one on you), LMP is the most reliable way to accurately date a pregnancy and is standard definition. It is that designation that makes a pregnancy “40 weeks” long, and it is that standard by which all OB-GYNs will date a pregnancy.