Georgia banning abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy

ATLANTA — Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed legislation on Tuesday banning abortions once a foetal heartbeat can be detected. That can be as early as six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant.

Kemp said he was signing the bill “to ensure that all Georgians have the opportunity to live, grow, learn and prosper in our great state.”

The signing caps weeks of tension and protests at the state capitol in Atlanta, and marks the beginning of what could be a lengthy and costly legal battle over the law’s constitutionality.

The legal showdown is exactly what supporters are looking for.

Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers across the country, energised by the new conservative majority on the US supreme court which includes president Donald Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, are pushing abortion bans in an attack on the high court’s 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which legalised abortion nationwide until a foetus is developed enough to live outside a woman’s uterus.

ACLU of Georgia legal director Sean Young said the group would challenge Georgia’s new abortion restriction in court.

“Under 50 years of supreme court precedent, this abortion ban is clearly unconstitutional,” Young said in a recent interview. “Every federal court that has heard a challenge to a similar ban has ruled that it’s unconstitutional.”

Under current law, women in Georgia can seek an abortion during the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy. If it’s not blocked in court, the new ban would take effect on 1 January 2020.

HB 481 makes exceptions in the case of rape and incest – if the woman files a police report first – and to save the life of the mother. It also would allow for abortions when a foetus is determined not to be viable because of serious medical issues.

The bill also deals with alimony, child support and even income tax deductions for foetuses, declaring that “the full value of a child begins at the point when a detectable human heartbeat exists.”

Republican representative Ed Setzler, the bill’s author, said in an interview after the bill passed the state house that it’s a “common sense” measure that seeks to “balance the difficult circumstances women find themselves in with the basic right to life of a child.”

But Democratic senator Jen Jordan disagreed that the legislation was balanced. “There’s nothing balanced about it, it’s an all-out abortion ban,” she said in a recent interview.

– Nampa-AP

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