Red State Panels To Decide When Women Are Close Enough To Death To Justify Abortion
Anti-choice zealots somehow believe that women and their doctors will lie to exploit an exception for the patient's health. So they came up with extremely narrow exceptions for the patient's life, requiring imminent death before terminating the pregnancy is legal. I never want to hear some right-wing ghoul call themselves "pro-life" again. When Roe was overturned, my first reaction was, "women will die," and here we are. Most of us saw that coming.
Via Slate:
After Roe's fall, ethics committees are taking on a new responsibility: determining whether a pregnant patient suffering a medical emergency may lawfully obtain an abortion. This task is actually a throwback to the 1960s and early 1970s, when states required hospitals to use "abortion committees" that decided when a pregnancy was dangerous enough to merit termination. The Supreme Court struck down those laws in a companion case to Roe, finding them "unduly restrictive of the patient's rights and needs." That decision, of course, has now been overturned. So, in 2022, committees formed for different purposes are suddenly undertaking a job that had been deemed unconstitutional since 1973: giving an up-or-down vote on an emergency abortion.
How did we get here?