Meg reminds us that in the midst of all the brouhaha in Iraq and Korea, things are still downright scary here at home.
With legislation that would impose sweeping new restrictions on abortion seemingly headed toward approval by the Senate this week, the assault on women’s reproductive freedom has reached an ominous turning point.
Although billed as a narrow attack on one particular late-term abortion procedure, the measure’s imprecise wording would criminalize the use of the safest and most common pre-viability abortion method used after the first trimester, namely dilation and evacuation. The bill would thereby replicate a key defect that caused the Supreme Court to reject a similarly worded state law in 2000. Moreover, the bill omits an exception in cases where the mother’s health is in jeopardy, ignoring the Supreme Court’s insistence that such an exception is a constitutional requirement for any abortion regulation.
It may be too late to do much about this, but we can hope that it will get struck down if it gets contested and goes to the Supreme Court — though at the moment, it looks like the bill’s backers are counting on a newly conservative Supreme Court to rule in their favor by the time the case makes it that far. Not encouraging, in the least.