Abortion rights foes in Nebraska break new ground

If you’re a woman seeking an abortion in Nebraska, your path is about to get a whole lot thornier:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- Two landmark measures putting new restrictions on abortion became law in Nebraska on Tuesday, including one that critics say breaks with court precedent by changing the legal rationale for a ban on later-term abortions.

Republican Gov. Dave Heineman signed both bills, one barring abortions at and after 20 weeks of pregnancy and the other requiring women to be screened before having abortions for mental health and other problems. Both sides of the abortion debate say the laws are firsts of their kind in the U.S.

This sort of nonsense is just maddening. Both of these restrictions are both ridiculous and, as Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights puts it, “flatly unconstitutional”. The first, that abortion is no longer available at and after the 20-week mark, is based on the premise that a fetus of 20 weeks can feel pain, which has been shown to be false. At 20 weeks, the neurological framework required to for the fetus to feel pain (or anything else) is only just beginning to develop and doesn’t allow for much of anything in terms of sensations or responses. In fact, the earliest a fetus has been found to respond to pain stimuli, according to studies of aggregated research data, is squarely in the third trimester at roughly 28 weeks or so. To say that abortion is cruel at or immediately after 20 weeks of gestation because the baby can feel pain is to be ignorant about the science of fetal development.

The second limitation, however, is even worse in the sense of how completely ridiculous and unfair it is. Seriously – forcing women who desire to have an abortion, a decision that inherently requires a great deal of forethought, to undergo a psychiatric examination to make sure they haven’t just gone insane or something? What is this, a veiled assertion that women only decide to want to have an abortion if they suddenly start hearing Lucifer whispering in their ear to off their baby or something? You don’t need a psyche exam before undergoing any other type of medical or surgical operation, so an abortion – an undertaking that is almost routine these days, from a procedural standpoint – shouldn’t require those who choose to have one to prove to others that she hasn’t suddenly developed some mental illness, either.

These new anti-abortion rights restrictions are also blatantly unsustainable from a legal standpoint as well, in that they directly violate decades of court rulings, precedents that would need to be overturned for these new laws to be enforceable. I don’t understand how even the most adamant of anti-abortionists could go along with these new “groundbreaking” policies, given the judicial headache that awaits them once they try and have them upheld in court when dozens of previous legal cases ruled directly against them. Anti-choicers may just have dug themselves into one heck of a hole with this one, so it will be interesting to watch them dig themselves in deeper as they try and keep these new restrictions from being thrown out – and hopefully soon.

(via @nytimes)