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New anti-abortion laws endangers more than the right to personal autonomy.
Brian Kemp, governor of the State of Georgia, has signed a bill into law that will ban all abortions after a “detectable human heartbeat” is found, excepting cases of rape or incest for which a police report has been filed to verify that the asserted date of conception is less than twenty weeks prior to the procedure or when the abortion is deemed to be medically necessary. Medical records in such cases would be available to the district attorney. And the law defines “unborn children as natural persons.”
That particular assertion clarifies any confusion that people may have that fetuses are corporations. The Republican Party of Georgia apparently would not want anyone to think that their concern is for “unborn children” who cannot donate to their campaigns. The real goal here is all too easy for me to guess, though I will be accused of having a left-wing bias — guilty — and I will defend my conclusions here.
As Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out, this declaration of fetuses as persons potentially allows prosecutors in Georgia to charge women who leave the state for the purpose of seeking an abortion with criminal conspiracy, a conspiracy to engage in an activity that is legal elsewhere.
I have long found the right wing’s assertion of states’ rights as one of their key…
