Here’s Why The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Escalating
By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
Graphics by Gus Wezerek
Filed under Abortion
Published May 21, 2019
Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky and now Alabama. In the past three months, five states have enacted laws that severely restrict access to abortion — sometimes as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The Alabama law that was signed by the governor last week bans abortion in nearly all cases, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and carries up to a 99-year prison sentence for doctors who perform the procedure. This recent spate of abortion restrictions marks the most direct challenge in recent memory to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion until the fetus reaches viability, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The push for these laws didn’t come out of nowhere. They’re part of an aggressive new strategy in the legal fight over abortion, which has escalated since Republican lawmakers swept state legislatures in 2010. Because of these efforts, it’s already more difficult to get an abortion in some parts of the country than it was a decade ago. Now, rather than continuing to chip away at abortion access, some anti-abortion advocates want to bring a case to the Supreme Court that could lead to the overturning of Roe and allow states to ban abortion completely — a goal that seems possible for the first time in decades because of a new five-justice conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
“There comes a time when we need to stop regulating around the edges of abortion,” said Janet Porter, an anti-abortion activist and early proponent of “heartbeat” laws, like Georgia’s, that ban abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. These laws, she said, were “crafted to be the arrow in the heart of Roe v. Wade.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...why-the-anti-abortion-movement-is-escalating/
