Alabama Senate passes near-total abortion ban








The bill's consideration Tuesday made frequent reference to the chamber's dramatic vote last week to drop an amendment that would have made exemptions to abortions performed for instances of rape or incest.

Republican State Sen. Clyde Chambliss, who ushered the bill through the chamber, emphasized in his introduction that the bill impacts women who are "known to be pregnant" and would provide "every female that's pregnant or thinks they're pregnant, and the male who was involved, it gives them that window of time -- this bill does not change that window of time."

In a news release, Chambliss touted that his bill outlaws surgical abortions as soon as a pregnancy can be medically determined. Speaking on the Senate floor, Chambliss repeatedly referred to a "window" of time between conception and when a woman knows for certain that she's pregnant. The state senator said he believed that time was between about seven and 10 days.

"She has to take a pregnancy test, she has to do something to know whether she's pregnant or not," he said.

"You can't know that immediately, it takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that."

Many women don't yet know for certain that they're pregnant even at six weeks into a pregnancy -- the earliest a fetal heartbeat can be detected.


"What I hope is, if we pass this bill, that all young ladies would be educated by their parents, their guardians that should a situation like this occur, you need to go get help -- you need to do it immediately," Chambliss said.

"Then also they can get justice in the situation," he added. "If they wait, justice delayed is justice denied."

Democratic state Sen. Vivian Figures told Chambliss that a rape victim's trauma "is not your business."

"You don't have to raise that child, you don't have to carry that child, you don't have to provide for that child, you don't have to do anything for that child," she told Chambliss. "But yet you want to make that decision for that woman, that that's what she has to do."

Figures proposed amendments to have legislators who backed the bill pay for the anticipated legal fees accrued by subsequent legal challenges, to expand Medicaid in anticipation of the bill's impact on low-income women, and to make having a vasectomy a class A felony, as the bill would designate performing an abortion. All three motions failed.

Eric Johnston, head of the Alabama Pro-life Coalition and the drafter of the initial legislation, told CNN that while the amendment to exempt rape and incest victims is "sympathetic" and "deals with very difficult issues," it would upend the law's legal standing.

"Regardless of how the conception takes place, the product is a child, and so we're saying that that unborn child is a person entitled to protection of law," he added. "So if, be it a rape or inecst conception, then it would be impossible to ask a judge which of these is protected by law and which is not."

Staci Fox, president of Planned Parenthood Southeast, told CNN before the chamber's vote that "even the authors of this bill know that it is blatantly unconstitutional and wouldn't stand up in court."

"We've seen the continual chipping away year after year in Alabama and efforts get bolder and bolder each year," Fox said. "I think with the President and now Kavanaugh on the court, the politics in Alabama just feel emboldened to take this egregious swipe at women's health care."


"There are already 14 cases nationwide in the pipeline, two of which are currently at the Supreme Court of the United States," he said. "The notion that somehow this is going to be the vehicle for the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade is really misplaced."
