[ad_1]
Lawmakers in Republican states are once again wasting their time and taxpayer dollars pushing bills intended to limit access to abortion.
Governor Tom Wolf has already vetoed similar bills and has made it clear he will do it again.
“Anytime an anti-choice bill hits my desk, I will veto it,” Wolf said Thursday at a press conference in Philadelphia alongside House Democrats and Senate Democrats. State as well as advocates for Planned Parenthood.
And yet, there are three anti-choice bills floating around the State Capitol.
A bill, sponsored by Representative Kate Klunk, R-Hanover, would ban abortions based on a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. The law requires doctors to submit documents proving that an abortion was not performed for this reason.
Following:Wolf once again vows to veto any bill limiting access to abortion in Pennsylvania.
Following:The battle for abortion rights heads to the Supreme Court
Following:‘Fetal Heartbeat’ in Abortion Laws Harnesses Emotion, Not Science
Wolf vetoed a similar bill in 2019, saying it was “a restriction on women and medical professionals and interferes with women’s health care and the taking of crucial decision between patients and their doctors ”. Yet the House passed the bill last week.
Klunk said in a support-seeking memo that she would continue to push the legislation forward because “every child deserves and has the right to life and children with Down’s syndrome are no exception.”
The House also introduced a bill last week that requires healthcare facilities to pay for the burial or cremation of fetal remains after miscarriage or abortion, regardless of early pregnancy or abortion. or miscarriage occurs. The current law deals with the burial or cremation of remains after 16 weeks of pregnancy.
The bill clarifies that families can still make their own arrangements but must cover the costs, ignoring the fact that any additional costs would be passed on to the woman or her insurance anyway.
It also doesn’t deal with miscarriages that occur at home, which is common in early pregnancy, leading some people to question whether this would prevent women who have miscarried from seeing a doctor.
The House passed a similar bill in 2019, but it stalled in the Senate.
A third recycled bill would use the medically flawed notion of a “fetal heartbeat” to ban abortion as early as six weeks, a time when many women would not even realize they are pregnant. This bill has gone through the House health committee but has not yet been voted on.
Enemies of abortion have pushed 13 states to enact these bills, although court cases have prevented their implementation for the time being. The bills ban abortion as soon as advanced technology can detect the first floating of tissue that could become a heart in an embryo – not a fetus, because medically an embryo does not become a fetus until the eighth week of life. pregnancy.
Not that medical science really has anything to do with these bills. Medically speaking, the only people to consult to terminate a pregnancy are the pregnant woman and her attending physician.
But Republican lawmakers trust neither the woman nor the doctor to do the right thing. Lawmakers want more voices in the situation, and they will continue to try to undermine a woman’s right to choose whether or not to give birth.
For this legislative session, at least, Wolf has promised to stop them. We can only hope that the next governor will continue to defend abortion rights, as the legislature will continue to try to erode them.
[ad_2]
