Not to be outdone by the Arkansas legislature, which overrode Governor’s Mike Beebe’s veto of a bill banning abortion after 12 weeks, the North Dakota legislature has passed what is now the most restrictive abortion law in the country.
Breathe easy, Kansas, Arizona, Arkansas, and South Dakota! North Dakota has got this.
HB 1456 bans abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which happens six or seven weeks into the pregnancy, two weeks after a woman misses her period, and about 28 days post-conception. That’s a ridiculously narrow window. The bill provides an exception for health of the mother, but no exception for rape.
Robin Marty writing for RH Reality Check points out that this law screws North Dakotan women, and not in a good way:
For any woman, trying to verify a pregnancy, set up an appointment, and jump through any of the hoops necessary to obtain an abortion in less than two weeks after a missed period would be a hardship. But for the women of North Dakota, where the sole clinic offering abortions is on the east end of the state, straddling the Minnesota border, it would be virtually impossible. And that’s just what politicians are hoping for.
The 2013 war on women marches inexorably onward.
[via RH Reality Check; and again here]
[cross-posted at ABLC]
TenguPhule
Sadly, I expect a rise in the rape rate in ND.
For if you pass it, they will come.
YellowJournalism
And if you’re lucky enough to catch the pregnancy within that window and get the necessary appointments, the only way to detect the fetal heartbeat at that early a stage is with a vaginal probe.
Litlebritdifrnt
My sister, who had unreliable periods, didn’t know she was pregnant until she was too far gone for a legal abortion under British Law (you know them commie baby killers). This new law is simply absurd. There are a ton of reasons where a woman might miss a period other than a pregnancy (hell I went without periods for a year after my GP prescribed me with a birth control pill with way too much estrogen in it, it wasn’t until I changed GPs when I changed duty stations in the Navy that anyone thought to do anything about it, he said to me “but however would you know if you were pregnant?” good question). At six weeks a fetus is a collection of cells with a heartbeat, kind of like an amoeba. This is utterly ridiculous.
arguingwithsignposts
It never fucking stops with these people.
Baud
They were going to look for fetal brain activity at first, but they realized that would allow abortions of Republican fetuses.
Mayken
Time for airlifting women out of ND, SD and the South.
Splitting Image
My sympathies to women in North Dakota, Arkansas, and anywhere within Rand Paul’s earshot, but I’m becoming more and more confident that this issue will be off of the political radar in another political cycle or two.
Remember that the Republicans did the exact same sort of grandstanding with gay marriage in 2004 (when every state they controlled passed the strictest law banning it that it could get away with) and look where it got them. It was a winning issue for a couple of years and saddled the party with a guaranteed vote loser for the next decade.
What you need to support if you want to genuinely call yourself pro-life is a multi-layered solution that makes having an abortion the solution of last resort: sex education, ending rape culture, affordable contraception, pre-natal care, and functioning support networks for everyone after birth. The wackier the anti-abortion bills get, the more obvious it is that the people who support them don’t care a fig about abortion as a real social problem.
You can look at the North Dakota and Arkansas bills, along with Rand Paul, as the proverbial two wetsuits and a dildo. The ginned-up controversy over abortion is as fake as the one over the gays.
nodakfarmboy
This North Dakota legislative session has been a disaster. They’ve passed massive cuts for oil companies and abominations like the bills listed above, while voting down bills providing milk to poor schoolkids and providing legal protection against employment and housing discrimination for our LGBT citizens. I’d like to think it would serve as a wake-up call to the “reasonable” people of the state, but I’m starting to lose hope. It’s been a seemingly endless string of new lows, which has led me to question why I’m still living here. You like to think your home can improve, but at this point I feel like conceding.
What a mess.
TenguPhule
So you think one FU or two?
Because people have been saying dumb things like that for decades now.
It never ever ends with these inhuman monsters.
cmorenc
These states (N. Dakota, Arkansas etc) are daring, prodding even to create a case that the five current rightward justices of the US Supreme Court will be irresistibly tempted to use as a vehicle to, if not to ourtight overturn Roe v. Wade, at least to whittle it down to a nub of its original self by redefining the point and scope of legitimate state intervention and the point where the fetus gains independent life and liberty interests. They know they have open an insecure window that will vanish if one of the current five most conservative justices dies or is forced by health to retire while a democrat holds the presidency and is able to name their replacement. As tantalyzingly close as they think their goal is (they have three votes to overturn for sure, they think Roberts is more leaning with them than not, if only the mercurial Kennedy would get on-board), they know it could dramatically disappear, and with stunning decisive swiftness, if but one conservative justice is replaced by a moderate. And so, they’re going all-in on a huge gamble, thinking that the worst they might lose with the current SCOTUS lineup is a push where incrementally more restrictions are allowable and a tepid 5-4 majority will only nominally uphold Roe v Wade without any more resonance than that it’s a settled precedent a majority isn’t willing to yet outright overturn.
Splitting Image
@TenguPhule:
Oh, I don’t think they will stop being inhuman monsters, but the main reason for the all-abortion, all-the-time spectacle of the last few years is that a lot of their other favourite talking points aren’t working anymore. The GOP will dump the abortion plank like hot lead as soon as it stops being a benefit to them.
srv
Science is a double-edged sword. The better the tech, the more potential the 27% will gravitate around a “scientific” legal definition that will be used to appeal to populists.
It surprises me that it took the absolutists this long to figure out the math – purity once again is the enemy of (their) progress.
What’s the earliest pregnancy detection technique? Two weeks?
cckids
@cmorenc:
This. I’m convinced that they keep passing this WTF “laws” so that some group or other will finally take them to court about it. Because they believe they have the votes at the Supremes to take down Roe forever.
Baud
@cckids:
I don’t see how, unless Kennedy has a change of heart.
PeakVT
@Splitting Image: No, they won’t. Abortion has become one of the most basic identifiers/tests for the Christianists, who are still by far the largest group within the Republican coalition. The Republican Party couldn’t drop the issue if it wanted, which it wouldn’t because the party is stuffed to the gills with Christianists.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
FTFY.
AndoChronic
Not to ignore the the oil boom of course, but ND really likes to shove their “population growth” stats. in Minnesota’s face! Is this another strategy?
burnspbesq
The last thing any Republican who is capable of thinking strategically wants is to overturn Roe. The current situation provides an endless supply of raw meat to throw in front of the fundies (and the minority of Catholics who pay attention to the bishops) to keep them motivated. Lose that, and risk that working-class Republican voters will realize that they have been voting against their own economic interests becomes dangerously high.
The best outcome for the Repubs is a preliminary injunction followed by years of discovery fights.
Felinious Wench
When do these new laws start being challenged in court?
PurpleGirl
I’m glad that I am not young anymore,…
No morning-after surprise…
Maurice Chevalier, Gigi (1958)
Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner
Scamp Dog
@nodakfarmboy: Denver’s a happening place with a (relatively) thriving economy. Give it a look if you decide to make a move.
ETA: or Colorado if big city/suburbia isn’t your thing.
Mike in NC
Why would anybody have a reason to visit North fucking Dakota in the first place?
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Baud:
That’s the thing that I’m shit scared of: he just might. He’s been walking pretty lock step with the other 4 for a while now. Him deciding to shuck precedent and give the GOP another massive gift ruling like this will have repercussions for decades, and the shitty thing is the best we can do is hold court far as the number of justices.
lojasmo
If only I had been raped as a young teen.
Ah, pleasant things.
lojasmo
Huh. Can’t edit.
I was sexually abused as a toddler.
Fuck T and H.
Tata
@Mike in NC:
My daughter – raised in New Jersey – lived there for several years because her husband was stationed in Minot. She had many things to say about her medical care there, but none of them were kind.
This is what the troops and their families are subjected to, and that is the reason to do something about it.
pseudonymous in nc
@cckids:
Of course they are. My guess is that this is basically a test of Justice Kennedy, whose position has been a weird “wimmins, know your place” thing where facial challenges go begging but the possibility of as-applied challenges remain; except, in this case, you basically need someone who’s eight weeks pregnant to file the case, and the timetable of the SCOTUS moots as-applied challenges. Similar thing with voting laws, where it’s basically mooted if you can’t cast a ballot. IANAL, but that’s my reading of the cases that have made it to SCOTUS.
My other guess is that the text was probably faxed in from DC by Charmaine Yoast, because no state legislature writes its own fucking laws on these topics any more.
pseudonymous in nc
@nodakfarmboy:
Welcome to Saudi Dakota: they’d ban women from driving but the oil workers would complain that it stopped the strippers from getting to work.
burnspbesq
@Felinious Wench:
Typically the first complaint is filed within 90 minutes if the governor signs the bill during hours when the court clerk’s office is open, or first thing the next morning if the bill is signed outside working hours.
fuckwit
I am stunned by how George Carlin completely and thoroughly nailed this, over 30 fucking years ago!
youtube.com/watch?v=AvF1Q3UidWM
I mean, wow. That was 1982. 1982! And he said all that, and it is perfectly succinct, completely airtight, and unassailablly correct, 30 years later. And people are still having this debate.
Really. Watch that and tell me he didn’t sum this up better than anyone has before or since, and he did it while Reagan was preznit.
Sheri
States are out doing each other to see who puts out the most restrictive regime against women choosing. The problem with this is that women will continue to terminate albeit in hiding.
Termination is just like taking drugs. People will do it whatever we do.
Splitting Image
@fuckwit:
George makes one big mistake there. He says that conservatives want women to be “brood mares for the state”. That’s more what an imaginary liberal would want. Conservatives prefer private industry solutions, so what they really want is for women to be brood mares for Wal-Mart and the financial industry.
low-tech cyclist
Can this math be translated into guy-speak?
By my arithmetic, this translates into pregnancy beginning 2-3 weeks before conception.
So a woman can be pregnant a couple weeks before losing her virginity? I’m just trying to figure this out here.