Ohio’s Abortion Bans Are Fucking Stupid
by JANET JAY
Ohio women must feel like they’re watching the most patronizing tennis match ever, as bills regulating what they can do with their bodies fly back and forth and — mostly — men debate their fate.
First came the so-called “heartbeat bill,” which — as the name implies — uses fetal pole cardiac activity as the cutoff for abortion. According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a heartbeat can be detected in an embryo at six weeks after fertilization.
But that could actually be eight weeks after the first day of your last period — which is another way to track it!
The bill would make it a fifth-degree felony, punishable by up to one year in prison, for a physician to perform an abortion without checking for a fetal heartbeat or performing the procedure after it can be detected. The doctor also could face a civil lawsuit from the mother and disciplinary action.
Gov. John Kasich vetoed the six-week fetal cardiac bill in favor of a 20-week ban. Now they’re saying that a woman doesn’t have the right to choose what’s best for herself and what’s growing inside her, regardless of how it got there or what major health problems either mother or fetus may have. The original bill didn’t even include exceptions for the life and life of the mother, but the final bill at least capitulated on that point.
However, here’s how they define it: abortions past this point are only legal if the mother has a “medically diagnosed condition that constitutes a ‘serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” [that]includes pre-eclampsia, inevitable abortion, and premature rupture of the membranes, but does not include a condition related to the woman’s mental health.’”
(And then just to drive it home: “No abortion shall be considered necessary under division (B)(1)(b) of this section on the basis of a claim or diagnosis that the pregnant woman will engage in conduct that would result in the pregnant woman’s death or a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman or based on any reason related to the woman’s mental health.”)
But though it sounds like good news, sort of, it’s really about which bill has the most potential to undo Roe v. Wade. This wasn’t the first heartbeat bill. Judges in similar Arkansas and North Dakota cases deemed similar legislation unconstitutional because it went against the “viability standard” the Supreme Court used in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The standard says abortions cannot be banned before a fetus can live outside the mother’s womb.
North Dakota’s bill was overturned by federal judge Daniel Hovland, who in 2013 wrote straightforwardly that he was bound to follow the law of the land, and that furthermore, “the state of North Dakota has presented no evidence to justify the passage of this troubling law.”
“The state has extended an invitation to an expensive court battle over a law restricting abortions that is a blatant violation of the constitutional guarantees afforded to all women.”
Predictably, some fundamentalists in Ohio want to override the bill’s veto. “Why does Ohio matter?” asked anti-choice activist Janet Porter, who has made herself a lightning rod of controversy from both sides of the aisle with some unsavory protest tactics. For the babies, of course — and “because this bill was crafted to be the arrow to strike the heart of Roe v. Wade.”
However, anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life did a good job of recognizing the motivations behind the bill switcheroo. “The 20-week ban was nationally designed to be the vehicle to end abortion in America,” president Mike Gonidakis said in a press release.
“It challenges the current national abortion standard and properly moves the legal needle from viability to the baby’s ability to feel pain. Given the current make-up of the United States Supreme Court, Governor Kasich got it right by embracing the strategic incremental approach to ending abortion. …. Legal scholars believe that asking the Court to entertain a third heartbeat law at this time would cause irreparable harm to the pro-life movement.”
Given that fewer than one percent of women who end their pregnancies in America do so after 20 weeks’ gestation, a stat which has stayed steady since the ’70s, the most important phrase there seems to be “properly moves the legal needle from viability to a baby’s ability to feel pain.”
There is a lot of science that refutes the claim that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks — enough for another column on its own — but that’s the assertion. Given how few of these happen, and how many of them involve a wanted child, a birth defect, and a wrenching decision between the least bad of two horrible choices, it seems like a red herring.
Does anybody still think this has anything to do with the health or wellbeing of the mother? Studies saying so don’t seem to matter, nor gory stories of the bad old days, nor the pleas of doctors.
“We have evidence that shows that banning abortion does not make it go away — it just increases the chances that people will seek care in potentially unsafe environments,” Dr. Diane Horvath-Cosper, a practitioner of clinical medicine and member of Physicians for Reproductive Health, told BuzzFeed News.
One of the biggest supporters of the “heartbeat bill” seems to have never really considered the subject closely. According to NPR, Rep. Jim Buchy (R) argued that the Ohio legislature needed to pass the Heartbeat Bill in order “to give people the incentive to be more responsible.”
“What do you think makes a woman want to have an abortion?” Al Jazeera asked Buchy in 2012.
“Well, there’s probably a lot of reas — I’m not a woman,” he said, chuckling. “I’m thinking now if I’m a woman why would I want to get … Some of it has to do with economics. A lot of it has to do with economics. I don’t know. I’ve never — it’s a question I’ve never even thought about.”
Just …. think about that for a minute. What are they actually talking about, really?
The rhetoric is one thing — but what does a woman experience at six weeks of pregnancy, around when fetal cardiac pole activity begins, and what is inside her that so-called “heartbeat bills” are legislating on?
Well … outwardly not much. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant until after six weeks, or until their second missed period. It’s far too early to be visible to those around them, and symptoms like morning sickness rarely start before six weeks, according to AmericanPregnancy.org.
“For those unfamiliar with women’s reproductive health, [six weeks] may sound like plenty of time to seek an abortion,” Caitlin Antonides explained in the Huffington Post. “But the reality is that this provides a measly two-week window from the time a woman misses her period because, sneaky sneaky, doctors count a pregnancy from a woman’s [last menstrual period].
“Surprise! You were technically pregnant for two weeks before you even had sex! You didn’t find out you were actually pregnant until (at the absolute earliest) two weeks after that so — stick with me on the simple math here — what we’re left with is two more weeks before hitting the proposed abortion cut off in Ohio.”
But the biology is nowhere near as black and white as lawmakers want it to be.
“The politicians know exactly what they are doing as a “heartbeat” bills is a way of making a four-millimeter thickening next to a yolk sac seem like it is almost ready to walk,” described OB/BYN — and “defender of evidence-based medicine” — Dr. Jennifer Gunter.
Her column juxtaposed these two photos — the first a piece of anti-abortion propaganda, the second an actual scan.
The Center for Disease Control doesn’t even recommend the earliest routine prenatal tests to detect possible birth defects until well after the six-to-eight-week “heartbeat” point.
Some major abnormalities, such as those caused by the Zika virus, can easily pass undetected until after the 20th week of pregnancy, as NPR has reported. One influential anti-abortion group, Prolife Across America, includes a “baby developmental facts” page with 11 different sonograms at different ages of gestation to give detailed information about the growth of the fetus. The sonograms do not even begin until week seven.
How can you not know you’re pregnant?!
Learning you’re pregnant within that time limit is in no way guaranteed for many reasons. Part of this exactitude assumes that each woman has a regular menstrual cycle, of course. Too bad that 30 percent of women experience irregular periods — sometimes also referred to as “abnormal menstruation” — at some point.
What can make a woman’s menstrual cycle irregular? Well …
- First getting your period — it can take a few years to even out — or the beginnings of menopause
- Stress (the most common cause!)
- Going off some kinds of birth control can mean it’ll take as long as six months for your body’s normal menstrual cycles to return
- Some women continue to have light, irregular periods early on and into their pregnancy
- Certain depression or anxiety medications can make your period irregular
- Breastfeeding releases hormones that can cause irregular cycles or no period at all. Most women’s cycles return to normal, but some are changed forever.
- Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
- Who knows why! Some women’s periods are just a little wonky. Not everybody gets 28 days they can schedule into a cute little phone app and immediately know when they’re late. Bodies don’t always work that way. And no birth control is perfect.
Even though the new law allows abortions up to 20 weeks, it provides no exceptions for rape or incest. It’s appalling enough that the state will force victims to carry the fetuses of their attackers. Now they’re also saying that a woman doesn’t have the right to not be harmed physically by what’s growing inside her.
Ohio is intent on legislating medicine: perhaps the most important sentence of the new bill is ‘ “Unborn child” means an individual organism of the species homo sapiens from fertilization until live birth.”
Fifteen other states have 20 week bans, according to the Associated Press. With the prospect of a Trump presidency and a possible Supreme Court appointment, so much is up in the air right now.
What we do know is that the battle will be expensive, and that representatives such as Buchy will continue to push to legislate what women do with their bodies based on faith and feelings, and not science.
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