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No, Women Won’t be Arrested Under the New Abortion Law in Alabama
Yes, it still spells trouble for the bodily autonomy of people who can get pregnant.
Alabama legislature passed a bill that would make an abortion or an attempted abortion a felony offense “except in cases where abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child’s mother”. Abortions will be treated as homicides regardless of viability or development stage. The bill itself uses a fetus’s heartbeat at six weeks and the fact that ultrasound imaging allows one to see the development of the fetus as examples of the humanity of a fetus. It also compares abortion to the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, Chinese purges, Cambodian killing fields, and Stalin’s gulags. Moreover, serious mental health issues that will cause a woman to harm the fetus will require a woman to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.
This term does not include a condition based on a claim that the woman is suffering from an emotional condition or a mental illness which will cause her to engage in conduct that intends to result in her death or the death of her unborn child. However, the condition may exist if a second physician who is licensed in Alabama as a psychiatrist, with a minimum of three years of clinical experience, examines the woman and documents that the…
