Wednesday, May 15, 2019

New Alabama abortion proclamation

(i) It is estimated that 6,000,000 Jewish people were murdered in German concentration camps during World War II; 3,000,000 people were executed by Joseph Stalin's regime in Soviet gulags; 2,500,000 people were murdered during the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" in 1958; 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970s; and approximately 1,000,000 people were murdered during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. All of these are widely acknowledged to have been crimes against humanity. By comparison, more than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973, more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin's gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined. ...

Section 4. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to intentionally perform or attempt to perform an abortion except as provided for by subsection (b).

(b) An abortion shall be permitted if an attending physician licensed in Alabama determines that an abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child's mother. Except in the case of a medical emergency as defined herein, the physician's determination shall be confirmed in writing by a second physician licensed in Alabama. The confirmation shall occur within 180 days after the abortion is completed and shall be prima facie evidence for a permitted abortion.

Section 5. No woman upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed shall be criminally or civilly liable. Furthermore, no physician confirming the serious health risk to the child's mother shall be criminally or civilly liable for those actions.

Section 6. (a) An abortion performed in violation of this act is a Class A felony.

(b) An attempted abortion performed in violation of this act is a Class C felony.

Section 7. This act shall not apply to a physician licensed in Alabama performing a termination of a pregnancy or assisting in performing a termination of a pregnancy due to a medical emergency as defined by this act.
This differs from existing law mainly in the definition of "serious health risk".

I do not expect this law to have any effect, because I do not think that there are five votes on the US Supreme Court to support.

This law is described as extreme, but note that it exonerates the expectant mother. If abortion were really murder, the the woman obtaining an abortion would be a murderer.

Suppose an Alabama woman is eight months pregnant, and the expectant father wants the baby. The woman takes a bus to a nearby state to have an abortion performed. The man may be of the opinion that the woman murdered his baby, and yet she has no liability or responsibility under this law whatsoever.

1 comment:

Sara Angelou said...
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