Abortion restrictions soon to occur in Alabama
By Ivy Ho
The most restrictive abortion legislation in the country recently signed by Alabama on May 15 rejected a proposal to add exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
The lawmakers in Alabama made it so that a woman can only get an abortion if her health is at risk. Though abortions are still currently available in the state, this measure will take effect in six months at earliest.
Ever since President Donald Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh as the two new conservative judges of the Supreme Court, getting an abortion has become significantly difficult, according to the Associated Press.
Katrina Miller Parrish, a family physician in clinical informatics says that despite whatever people believe in, choosing to receive an abortion is still a tough choice to make.
“For some people, it’s a definite yes or no for folks who have a religion that precludes that they would terminate a pregnancy,” Parrish said. “For folks who just don’t want to have kids, the decision can still be very easy to very difficult.”
Besides having to decide whether or not to receive an abortion, women still have to figure out whether or not a procedure is safe enough for them.
“There are various ways to complete the process,” said Parrish. “The first part of it is definitely counseling and discussing with a healthcare provider the decision itself and risks and benefits of the procedure or the various types of ways the procedure can happen.”
However, according to Guttmacher Institute last year, a sexual and reproductive health research group, an estimated 214 million women in developing regions have don’t have access to modern contraception in order to avoid a pregnancy or are using less effective traditional methods.
Therefore, these women may not even have a healthcare provider to help them which only makes it harder to decide if they want to go through with a procedure.
“The termination procedure itself can be very physically and emotionally challenging even if you don’t expect it to be, even if you think you’re totally prepared for it,” said Parrish. “When you actually go through it, it can be completely different from what you thought.”
Although abortion was ruled legal in all 50 states by the US Supreme Court in the landmark case Roe v. Wade, where a woman’s right to an abortion became protected by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, anti-abortion activists and politicians are still working at restricting access to abortion across the country.
In addition, states such as Georgia, Mississippi and Ohio have passed heartbeat bills, prohibiting abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected. This can be as early as six weeks before women may even realize they’re pregnant.
Beginning with Ohio’s sample bill, the heartbeat bills were an outcome of nearly 10 years of calculated effort of states attempting to ban abortion. The seven states that accounted for more than one-third of the copying of anti-abortion model legislation were: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio.
While doctors in Alabama could be charged with a felony and face up to 99 years in prison for allowing abortions, women who receive an abortion will not be penalized.
Women have abortions as a result of unintended pregnancies, which is why abortions have been around since 1973 when it became legal in the United States.
“The first issue is what are the circumstances of why they feel like they need to terminate a pregnancy and those circumstances can be anything from incredibly emotional and traumatic to expected,” Parrish said. “You have to start by looking at what the scenario was in terms of how it occurred.”
