The Republican-dominated Arkansas Senate Thursday passed a bill banning the most common and most medically accepted method of performing abortions during the second trimester of pregnancy. The vote was 25-6. The House passed the bill 78-10 on Monday. It now goes on to the governor who will almost certainly sign it.
If he does, Arkansas will become the seventh state where a similar law has been passed. The courts have blocked implementation of such laws in four states, leaving it in effect in Louisiana and Mississippi. All told, 16 states have attempted to pass the bans. These have been a priority on the forced-birthers’ roster of anti-abortion legislation since the first ban passed in 2014.
Advocates call these “dismemberment bans.” But physicians have a less gruesome name for the widely used procedure—“dilation and evacuation.”
Most abortions—88 percent—are performed in the first trimester. But D&E is used in 96 percent of second-trimester abortions, according to the National Abortion Federation Abortion Training Textbook. The World Health Organization calls this the safest and simplest way to terminate a pregnancy after 12 weeks of gestation. The abortion provider dilates the woman’s cervix and inserts surgical instruments into her uterus to remove fetal and placental tissue.
As Laurel Raymond pointed out last year at ThinkProgress, the campaign to get these bans passed is gaining momentum. Forced-birthers have openly stated that these bans constitute the next “pro-life conquest.” The idea is to build up laws state by state in hopes of reaching a Supreme Court showdown. It doesn’t matter to the campaigners that some of these state laws are overturned long before cases ever make it to the Supreme Court. That’s because eventually they figure that contradictory opinions at the Circuit Court level will require the Supremes to step in.
Forced-birthers have used the same tactic to try to outlaw D&E as they have done in those other campaigns. Standard procedure for these advocates is to try out proposals in one or two states and then move on to others if they are successful, tweaking the language when necessary to overcome objections that might kill a bill legislatively:
“The language is intentionally inflammatory and dramatic,” Amanda Allen, senior state legislative counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights told ThinkProgress about the growing trend in fetal dismemberment bills. “The graphic terminology is meant to paint abortion providers and people who want an abortion in the second trimester as evil. These terms have no basis in medical language.”
But this emotional framing — stoking moral outrage about fetuses, rather than focusing on the safety of women seeking a legal medical procedure — is very effective. As the passage of the Louisiana law shows, anti-abortion advocates are successfully manipulating public opinion, and passing legislation that may actually endanger women’s health and constitutional rights.