When it comes to forced-birther laws, it’s hard to keep up.
The state of Oklahoma is especially prolific, even though several of its laws seeking to curtail abortion have been overturned by the courts. This week, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed The Humanity of the Unborn Child Act. The law requires “the State Department of Education to establish, operate and maintain a public information program to educate the public about the humanity of a child in utero.”
In addition to delivering this information to the general public, the program would be taught in every public high school in Oklahoma. The law states that the materials used “shall clearly and consistently teach that abortion kills a living human being.”
The idea behind this is to create an “abortion-free society.” But while the act requires instruction of students in the stages of fetal development and alternatives to abortion, nowhere in the act is any reference to contraception, the No. 1 alternative to abortion. Oklahoma is one of 29 states that don’t mandate sex education in public schools, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute. Four of the state’s five largest school districts have no sex ed programs.
Oklahoma has the nation’s third highest rate of teen births. The state has the sixth highest abortion rate.
There is one hangup with the propaganda program Fallin signed: It is contingent on finding funding. And money for education is in short supply in Oklahoma’s government coffers. Why? Tax breaks to the oil and gas industry, according to some critics. Hundred of millions of dollars in revenue have been lost each year from tax breaks on horizontal drilling since 2008.
Meanwhile, a Pennsylvania forced-birther bill that had been tabled in the state House of Representatives in April has been resurrected by Republican senators. It would outlaw the safest, simplest, and most common form of abortion used during the second trimester of pregnancy. That method, which physicians call dilation and evacuation, is widely used worldwide for abortions that take place after the 12th week of gestation. Any doctor found by a court to have performed the procedure would be guilty of a third-degree felony and face a prison term of up to seven years, and fines of up to $15,000.
If the bill passes the Republican-dominated legislature and gets past a promised veto from Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania would become the seventh state to pass one of these cookie-cutter proposals originally drafted by the National Right to Life Committee, one of the nation’s oldest forced-birther groups.
Oklahoma, no surprise, was one of those states. But the law there, along with the one in Kansas, has been blocked by the courts. The other states are Louisiana—where the law passed the state legislature and was signed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards last week—Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia. In the latter case, Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin vetoed the act, but the legislature overrode him.
Eventually, one of these laws will presumably make its way to the Supreme Court. The make-up of that body when this happens will obviously determine whether reproductive rights are strengthened or further weakened, as they have been since Roe v. Wade was decided 43 years ago.