A new Ohio bill would charge doctors with “abortion murder” unless they perform a medically impossible procedure, The Guardian reports.
Ohio House Bill 413 would ban abortion outright and define a fertilized egg as an “unborn child.”
The bill, which is more than 700 pages long and has nearly two dozen co-sponsors, would charge doctors and women with “abortion murder” if they “perform or have an abortion.”
The bill also requires doctors to take “all possible steps to preserve the life” of an unborn child, including “attempting to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into the woman’s uterus.”
Doctors say that’s not possible:
“That’s impossible,” tweeted Ohio OB/GYN Dr. David Hackney. “We’ll all be going to jail.”
Dr. Kathie Allen explained that the bill “puts pregnant women at high risk of death,” adding that ectopic pregnancies, though relatively rare, are already the “leading cause of death in the first trimester.”
Trauma surgeon Dr. Joseph Sakran called the bill “perhaps the most asinine piece of legislation EVER.”
“If your Goal was to write a bill that is NOT medically possible & puts women at risk for death....well done!” he tweeted.
Abortion groups warn of Supreme Court battle:
“They want to ban abortion; they want to classify it legally as murder; they want to impose criminal penalties against people who get abortions and people who provide them,” Kellie Copeland of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio told The Washington Post. “That’s been the goal of all of the abortion legislation we’ve seen in Ohio. This kind of legislation is revealing the ultimate agenda of our opponents.”
“This is something that … we’ve been battling in Ohio legislature for over a decade,” she added. “The stakes are so much higher now because the majority on the Supreme Court has changed with the Trump presidency and all the appointments on the federal courts.”
