The maternal mortality rate has been on the rise in America, the richest country in the world. If forced-birthers in several states have their way in the courts with stringent new abortion restrictions, that rate will go higher still.
Although they aren’t the only states that have passed deceptive “fetal heartbeat” laws, Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio have approved the worst of them. None have yet been implemented, and they are likely to be blocked unless some federal court, perhaps the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, chooses to ignore the nearly half-century-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion nationwide. But that’s the point. Although not all forced-birthers are on board, each of these new laws represents an aggressive new tactic designed to get a case to a Supreme Court whose newest member, Brett Kavanaugh, may be the deciding vote to jettison what he allegedly claimed before his Senate confirmation to Republican Sen. Susan Collins is “settled law.”
The drastic “fetal heartbeat” laws in these states put the lie to the “pro-life” label that forced-birthers have long applied to themselves. In fact, if these laws were to survive litigation, they would kill women and lead to more deaths of babies born with severe defects. Kiera Butler at Mother Jones writes:
Dr. Tiffany Hailstorks, a Georgia OB-GYN and an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Emory University, explained it to me this way: The new bills make exceptions for pregnancies in which the mother’s life is in danger. But some medical conditions—certain heart problems, blood pressure conditions, and kidney disease—can be relatively benign in early pregnancy. As the pregnancy progresses, though, when they are severe—and sometimes during childbirth or the postpartum period—they can become very dangerous and difficult to control, even with medication. “It’s not clear in these bills if these latent conditions would qualify as life-threatening,” said Hailstorks. She added that lack of good prenatal care can make these problems even riskier. That’s especially worrisome because often if a pregnancy is unplanned or unwanted, women delay seeing a doctor. Add to that, some of the states proposing the bans are already dangerous places to have a baby. Georgia’s maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the nation, and Mississippi is 19th.
There is also a huge racial difference in rates of maternal mortality. Black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth or soon after than white women. These laws would likely increase that disparity. Dr. Sanithia Williams, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California-San Francisco and a fellow at the reproductive rights group Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Butler, “It is black women who have the highest risk of death in pregnancy and around childbirth. So what does it mean when women with these risks can’t make decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy? It’s a dangerous situation.”
But as has become all too obvious over the decades, such dangers and inevitable deaths make no nevermind to forced-birthers.