An Ohio Republican, Rep. John Becker, is getting backing for legislation that would ban most effective methods of birth control by deeming them abortion, and would also ban most private insurance coverage for abortion, which the state has already banned after six weeks. But that's not all. Not by a long shot.
It would also force women to undergo a medical procedure that does not exist to avoid abortion when they're having an ectopic or tubal pregnancy. The man who wrote the bill explains it as "removing that embryo from the fallopian tube and reinserting it in the uterus so that is defined as not an abortion under this bill."
Which is not even conceivably a medical treatment that exists, as Jaime Miracle, deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, noted. "That doesn't exist in the realm of treatment for ectopic pregnancy. You can't just re-implant. It's not a medical thing." Dr. Daniel Grossman, a practicing OB-GYN and researcher on abortion and contraception, backs that up in a Twitter thread in which he offers Becker "some help understanding ectopic pregnancy." For one thing, he writes, "ectopic pregnancies cannot continue to a live birth. If untreated, as a pregnancy grows, the Fallopian tube (where 96% of ectopics develop) gets stretched to the point of rupture & can cause massive bleeding." Four percent of maternal deaths are a result of ectopic pregnancies. Furthermore, "an ectopic pregnancy cannot be 'reimplanted' into the uterus," he writes. "We just don't have the technology. So I would suggest removing this from your bill, since it's pure science fiction."
That might actually be what Becker and his Republican pals are after: generating so much backlash against this extreme and ridiculous part of the bill that it gets struck out, and the rest remains. The rest would ban the most effective means of birth control by calling them abortifacients, an old trick of the forced-birther crowd. "Birth control pills, IUD's and other methods of birth control like that—the bill states that any birth control that could act to stop a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus is considered an abortion under this bill," Miracle says.
Maybe Becker is stupid enough to believe that reimplanting an ectopic fertilized egg is a thing, because certainly the last thing a Republican man knows is anything at all about lady parts or science. Or maybe he's smart enough to do this massive head fake to get birth control banned.