Repro Rights Roundup: Turns Out Those Pre-Roe Bans Weren't Very Thought Through

Whoops!

All the weeks abortion and reproductive rights news that is fit to print. Or in this case, type on a screen!

Judge Overturns Georgia's Terrible Abortion Ban

Prior to Dobbs , Republicans spent years passing anti-abortion laws that could not actually be enacted because they violated Roe . It wasn't a totally stupid idea — the laws were meant to challenge Roe and also kept the issue fresh in voters' minds. Whether they could be passed or not, anti-choice voters saw the laws as proof their lawmakers were fighting for them and doing what they put them there to do. This also surely made up for the fact that Republicans had no actual policy ideas.

These laws were, of course, expected to go into effect as soon as Roe was overturned. Some of them did. Georgia's law did — a law barring abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant, with exceptions for rape and incest, life of the mother, unviable fetuses and the father being Herschel Walker.

However, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney has overturned the law, which had been in effect since July, ruling that because it was unconstitutional at the time it was passed three years ago, it is now void. Whoops!

The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, which also argued that the ban violated the Georgia constitution's right to privacy, but McBurney did not rule on that claim.

The state has filed an appeal, but for now Georgians can expect to be able to have abortions after six weeks at participating clinics around the state.

Should they try and enact a new law, they might find they have some trouble, because people seem to prefer fantasy abortion bans to the real thing.

Anti-Abortion Orgs Reveal Plan To Go After Contraception And IVF Next

Tennessee was another state that went ahead and passed anti-abortion legislation before Roe was overturned — legislation that included very few exceptions. At least one of the legislators that voted for it, Republican Sen. Richard Briggs (himself a surgeon), now says he only voted for it because he thought it would never go into effect and is now worried about how scientifically ridiculous and medically dangerous it is.

In hopes of keeping legislators behind the law as it stands, Tennessee's affiliate of National Right to Life held a webinar encouraging them to hold the line — telling them that if they just keep their mouths shut for "200 days," all of the concerns about exceptions and dead patients would go away and people would learn to love the new law so much they would be able to pass it as model legislation in other states.

ProPublica gained access to a recording of that meeting, which outlined some of the very disturbing things anti-choicers have planned for the future.

A Tennessee lawmaker on the call suggested health data could be mined to track and investigate doctors, to make sure the abortions they provided to save patients' lives were truly necessary.

The discussion also captured anti-abortion groups coaching legislators on messages aimed at swaying the wider public to support their stance.

One researcher said that when lawmakers are challenged about the state’s lack of exceptions for rape and incest cases, they should try to “hide behind the skirts of women” who carried such pregnancies to term and believe abortion is wrong. Others suggested “negativity” toward the law would fade and raised the possibility of regulating contraception and in vitro fertilization in a few years’ time.

Yep, they're coming for IVF and contraception next, and now that the whole "right to privacy" thing is out the window, legislators can't wait to investigate people's private medical information. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

What? The Law Ohio Passed Pre- Hobbs Was Also Bad?

Huh! It's almost as if these people passing these laws didn't really think anything through at all.

Ohio's six-week abortion ban is currently unenforceable, having been blocked by a Hamilton County judge while it is being challenged by a lawsuit. Still, Republicans in the state are now trying to consider ways to adjust the law and add "better definitions" so that it is more clear what they are going for.

Right now, the law only has two exceptions — if there is no heartbeat (which there wouldn't be anyway because there is no heart at six-weeks, but whatever) and in the event of a “medically diagnosed condition that so complicates the pregnancy of the woman as to directly or indirectly cause the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” There are no exceptions for rape or incest and, like the other laws, the Ohio law makes it so doctors pretty much have to wait until the patient is at death's door before they can do anything to help them.

“Now, they want to cover up the fact that they knew exactly the harms they were causing when they passed the 6-week abortion ban with fake compassion and concern,” Pro-Choice Ohio Executive Director Kellie Copeland told News 5 Cleveland. “Abortion bans are catastrophe for the practice of medicine in our state, and there is no way to change that with ‘better definitions.’”

Rural Areas Increasingly Have No Reproductive Health Care At All

That the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any "wealthy" nation should not come as a surprise, given that we're not quite as into people having health care as those other nations seem to be.

 The Washington Post reports that women who live in rural communities in the US are 60 percent more likely to die in childbirth than their urban counterparts, largely because they have to travel so very far to find a maternity ward anywhere. The fact is, it's just not profitable to open hospitals in rural areas, and that's really what health care in the United States is all about.

The Post's profile focuses on the Mabel Wadsworth Center clinic in Bangor, Maine, noting that "60,000 women in northern New England live farther than 15 miles from a maternity ward." The problem is, however, much worse in the South, particularly in predominantly Black areas — which is part of why Black women are three times as likely to die of pregnancy complications than are white women.

It is just as important that people have access to pregnancy-related health care as it is that they have access to abortion. However, making abortion illegal will likely result in many of these rural areas having even fewer options for reproductive health care, simply because doctors who do this work will likely prefer to work in states where they won't get sent to prison for taking care of their patients. Life!

South Carolina Wanted Former Miss South Carolina To Carry Unviable Fetus To Term

Jill Hartle, Miss South Carolina 2013 and a lifelong Republican, told reporters from People magazine her very personal story of finding out when she was 18 weeks pregnant that the child she very much wanted had Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, an incurable fetal anomaly that can be fatal without multiple heart surgeries and often a heart transplant after birth.

Because they wanted to keep the baby, Hartle and her husband waited another 4 weeks to see how severe the HLHS was. It turned out to be very severe and to have the added complication of aortic atresia.

Via People:  

It was time for Jill and Matt to think about the future. "The doctors just kept talking about the surgeries," says Jill. "They basically explained that every child with HLHS — no matter if it's the least severe case or the most severe case — will have to have three open-heart surgeries at a very young age. The first open-heart surgery happens the first week of life. The second open-heart surgery happens at six months old. And then there's a third open-heart surgery, and eventually, a wait for a transplant. And if they're lucky enough to get a heart and if their body accepts it, then every 10 years after that, they're back on the heart transplant list because hearts only last 10 to 15 years. So even best-case scenario was still a very grim outlook."

"We decided that the best thing for our particular case and our particular daughter, Ivy Grace, was to just give her the most peaceful possible way to heaven and to be healed and to be free and never feel a moment's pain."

Unfortunately, South Carolina had already passed a law outlawing abortion after 6 weeks, so she and her husband had to go and find a state where they could terminate at 24 weeks. Luckily, they had the money to do this, since many people do not.

The two have since started the Ivy Grace Project , which seeks to educate people about the impact of abortion laws on fetal anomalies, which the former beauty queen believes people have not considered as much as other issues regarding abortion. Unfortunately, the problem isn't so much that they haven't considered it, but that they don't care and choose to lie about it — preferring instead to claim that people like the Hartles are having "post-birth" abortions for funsies.

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. Click below to tip us!