Utah Governor Gary Herbert has signed a bill requiring that doctors administer anesthesia to people receiving abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The bill, you will be non-surprised to learn, isn’t about concern for a pregnant person’s health, but is based on the bogus notion that 20-week fetuses can feel pain.
New Mexico—my home state and the best place on earth—has always been an oasis of common sense and compassion when it comes to abortion laws. But the new GOP majority in the state legislature is working to make that a thing of the past, successfully passing two bills out of committee that would severely limit access to…
Dear God, it's like they're actively trying to get us to insult them: yet another Republican politician has argued against allowing rape survivors to get abortions, because while rape is "obviously awful," the children it can potentially produce are beautiful. Yep. Nothing lovelier than a forced pregnancy.
Great news, everybody (not), last night Ohio Gov./terrible human John Kasich signed the state's new two-year, $62 billion state budget. One of the heartiest and most depressing cuts? Planned Parenthood.
35 Ohio House Republicans introduced an exhaustive anti-abortion bill yesterday that would require doctors to lie to women and force them to pay for unnecessary medical procedures, among other fun doctor-patient trust exercises.
Trent Franks, the Arizona Republican who proposed a 20-week abortion ban in Washington, DC and then barred DC's pro-choice female delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton from speaking out against the measure has a new problem on his hands: a flood of DC residents who are bringing their municipal complaints directly to the…
Georgia is just a governor's signature away from totally banning abortions that occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy under the dubious assertion that at that point, fetuses can feel pain. Anti-abortion advocates crow that this is a positive step toward protecting life, but where this law is totally and irredeemably…
Like the "enhanced screening room" and the inbox of Chris Brown's publicist, nothing good happens on the floor of the Georgia legislature lately, and a speech last week by Representative Terry England brought that fact into focus with a jaw-droppingly insensitive series of comments wherein he reasoned that because…
This year, a rash of legislation has left the country inflamed and itchy with extreme abortion restrictions that, in many cases, would force a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy to receive a medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound. But if you think the legislation in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Alabama,…
Undaunted by public outcry against Virginia's mandatory ultrasound law, lawmakers in several other states have taken up the mantle of solving their respective stomping grounds' whatever crises by restricting how much choice and control a woman has over her body. Here's a little breakdown of the shit sandwiches your…
Today, a panel of Democratic lawmakers in Georgia will convene for a historic debate on a bill that proposes limits on vasectomies on the grounds that they deprive children "the opportunity to be born." The anti-vasectomy bill's framers aren't serious; they're making a point about the stupidity of conservative…
Jennie Linn McCormack, who was jailed for terminating her pregnancy with abortion pills she bought online, won a victory last week in her lawsuit challenging Idaho's abortion laws. A judge put a temporary ban on the enforcement of a 1972 law against self-induced abortion. However, her attept to block the measure that…
In the past two years, six states have banned abortion after 20 weeks on the grounds that that's when fetuses can feel pain. There is no reliable scientific evidence that this is true, and now a new study says that a fetus can't distinguish between touch and pain until around 35-37 weeks, or just before a baby would…
The "fetal pain"-inspired abortion bans at 20 weeks sweeping states aren't just unconstitutional and lacking scientific basis, they also lack medical exceptions. So women like Nebraskan Danielle Deaver are forced to carry severely-impaired fetuses until stillbirth, risking serious infection.
Following Nebraska's lead, 16 states are considering bills that would ban abortion at 20 weeks, because that's when a fetus can feel pain. The problem? There actually is no scientific consensus on when a fetus can experience pain.
It's not your imagination: Abortion rights are under assault in the U.S. as never before. And you can thank a 2007 Supreme Court decision for the state-by-state onslaught.
Nebraska Senator (and former Bush Agriculture Secretary) Mike Johanns is sponsoring federal legislation to make doctors tell women having abortions that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks despite there being no scientific consent on that. Silly "science." [AP]
A recent Nebraska law banned abortions before 20 weeks because, it claimed, that's when fetuses feel pain. But British research finds that fetuses can't feel pain before 24 weeks — and probably don't feel it after that either.
On the heels of a law requiring a variety of screenings before women can get an abortion, Nebraska has now challenged Roe v. Wade by banning abortions after 20 weeks, on the grounds that that's when fetuses feel pain.