Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Ealier this month, the state of Arkansas passed the most restrictive abortion law in the nation — a 12-week ban that prohibits most abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected using an abdominal ultrasound.
Arkansas' action touched off a race to the bottom among Republican-controled state legislatures where the Christian Taliban is firmly in control.
The state of North Dakota passed two anti-abortion bills last week, one banning most abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected,
something that can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy (before many women are even aware that they are pregnant).
Another measure would prohibit women from having the procedure because a
fetus has a genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome. Lawmakers urge governor to veto North Dakota abortion bills:
If the governor signs the measures, North Dakota would be the only state with those laws.
North
Dakota is one of several states with Republican-controlled Legislatures
and GOP governors looking at abortion restrictions, ranging from
denying funding under the federal health care law to requiring women to
get an ultrasound and teenagers to get parental permission before having
abortions. Just days before North Dakota lawmakers approved the ban,
Arkansas instituted a 12-week ban that prohibits most abortions when a
fetal heartbeat can be detected using an abdominal ultrasound.
A
fetal heartbeat can generally be detected earlier in a pregnancy using a
vaginal ultrasound, but Arkansas lawmakers balked at requiring women
seeking abortions to have the more invasive imaging technique. North
Dakota’s measure doesn’t specify how a fetal heartbeat would be
detected.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers has urged Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple
to veto measures that would make North Dakota home to the nation’s most
restrictive abortion laws.
“There is concern that we are making laws outlawing a perfectly legal medical procedure,” Hawken said.
“We spoke from the heart to the governor,” she said. “It’s a very tough decision for him. We could see that on his face.”
The "fetus fetish" Christian Taliban took matters into their own hands on Friday, bypassing the governor and sending directly to the voters of North Dakota a "personhood" ballot measure that would ban abortions by defining human life as beginning with conception. North Daiinkota Personhood Measure Passes State House:
North Dakota became the first state on Friday to pass a fetal
personhood amendment, which grants legal personhood rights to embryos
from the moment of fertilization. The state House of Representatives
voted 57 to 35 to pass the amendment, after the Senate passed the same
measure last month.
The measure will now appear on the November 2014 ballot, and voters
will be able to accept or reject it. If it passes, it will amend North
Dakota's constitution to state that “the inalienable right to life of
every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and
protected.” The amendment would ban abortion in the state, without
exceptions for rape, incest or life of the mother, and it could affect
the legality of some forms of birth control, stem cell research and in
vitro fertilization.
Similar fetal personhood initiatives have been rejected by voters in
several other states, including Colorado and Mississippi, one of the most socially
conservative states in the country. This is a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade (1973) in an attempt to get a state constitutional case before the conservative activist Roberts Court to give the U.S. Supreme Court the opprtunity to reconsider the Roe v. Wade decision.
This is a cautionary warning. Mullah Cathi Herrod and her Christian Taliban at Center for Arizona Policy have been relatively quiet in this session of the Arizona legislature (the "show me your papers to pee bill" is one exception), but next year is an election year and the CAP will want to give the Christian Taliban something to wage a crusade at the polls. I would not be surprised to see what is happening in North Dakota introduced in the next session of the Arizona legislature.
I have said before that the 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale was
supposed to be a work of futuristic science fiction, but it is turning
out to be a "how to" handbook for the theocratic Christian Taliban. The Handmaid's Tale Plot Summary and Details:
In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife
and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In
the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American
Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female
population sterile, Kate sees her husband killed and her daughter
kidnapped while trying to escape across the border. Kate herself is
transformed into a handmaid — a surrogate mother for one of the
privileged but barren couples who run the country's fundamentalist
regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the bizarre cult
of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist
cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds
herself ensconced at the home of the Commander and his frosty wife,
Serena Joy… Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns
that since many of the nation's powerful men are as sterile as their
wives, she may have to risk the punishment for fornication — death by
hanging — in order to sleep with another man who can provide her with
the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d'être.
If people remain silent as women are systematically deprived of their
constitutional liberties and rights and reduced to second class
citizens — simply by virtue of a pregnancy — and become property of the state, this dystopian fable can all too
readily become a reality.
UPDATE: On Tuesday, N.D. governor signs bill banning most abortions:
Gov. Jack Dalrymple
signed legislation Tuesday that that would make North Dakota the
nation’s most restrictive state on abortion rights, banning the
procedure if a fetal heartbeat can be detected — something that can
happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.
The Republican governor also signed into law another measure
that would makes North Dakota the first to ban abortions based on
genetic defects such as Down syndrome, and a measure that requires a
doctor who performs abortions to be a physician with hospital-admitting
privileges.
The measures, which would take effect Aug. 1, are fueled in
part by an attempt to close the state’s sole abortion clinic in Fargo.
Dalrymple, in a statement, said the so-called fetal heartbeat bill is a
direct challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling
that legalized abortion up until a fetus is considered viable, usually
at 22 to 24 weeks.
“Although the likelihood of this measure surviving a court challenge
remains in question, this bill is nevertheless a legitimate attempt by a
state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade,” Dalrymple
said.
The GOP make-over to reach out to women voters is off to a bad start.