Republican legislators are fast-tracking a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Gov. Scott Walker, on the campaign trail as he courts conservative Republican voters in other states, has called for and said he’d sign.
Last week, Walker boasted about his pro-life record in an interview with a conservative radio host, dismissing criticism of the pre-abortion ultrasounds he mandated in his first term.
“It’s just a cool thing out there,” he said of the ultrasounds he requires women seeking an abortion to undergo.
But that “cool thing” may not be enough to prop up Walker’s pro-life record on the campaign trail as he battles other conservatives, so Republicans are rushing the 20-week abortion ban through the Legislature. Introduced in May, the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Bill was heard in a rare joint committee, made up of members of both legislative houses on Tuesday.
The bill, authored by New Berlin state Sen. Mary Lazich and state Rep. Jesse Kremer of Kewaskum with 30 cosponsors signing on, would criminalize abortions performed 20 weeks after the woman’s egg was fertilized. There are no exemptions for women who became pregnant through rape or incest, or if the fetus had severe physical anomalies and little to no chance for survival. Nor could a woman obtain an abortion after 20 weeks if the pregnancy harmed her health or wellbeing.
Under the bill, a doctor performing the procedure would be committing a felony if the woman wasn’t in the midst of a “medical emergency” that put her life in imminent risk. Even then, the doctor would be required to terminate the pregnancy in a way that “provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive,” the bill states. Not only would the doctor potentially face up to three and a half years in prison and a $10,000 fine for violating the law, but the woman, her partner (if she isn’t the victim of rape or incest) and their parents would be able to sue the doctor as well.
“There is nothing in the text or tradition of the Constitution that precludes Wisconsin from extending the most basic protections of the law to five-month unborn babies experiencing significant pain,” Lazich told the legislative committee.
No other medical procedure is criminalized in Wisconsin, according to experts contacted for this story.
Physicians Criticize Political Misinformation
Like other abortion bills, this one is pitting social conservatives and pro-life groups against the medical establishment and pro-choice groups.
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Wisconsin Right to Life supports the bill. But Pro-Life Wisconsin and Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), the socially conservative group that led the crusade for Wisconsin’s unconstitutional same-sex marriage ban, say it isn’t stringent enough. In a statement, WFA President Julaine Appling said that her organization couldn’t support the bill because it contains an “unnecessary medical emergency exception.”
Lining up in opposition are members of the mainstream medical establishment—the Wisconsin Medical Society, the Wisconsin Academy of Family Physicians and the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH)—as well as Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin (PPAWI) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin.
Dr. Tosha Wetterneck, former president of the Wisconsin Medical Society, told the Shepherd the organization opposes the legislation because it interferes with the doctor-patient relationship, which she calls “a sacred bond,” and because the assertion that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks simply doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.
“The majority of medical professionals would say that this premise is false and that the whole premise for the legislation is false,” Wetterneck said.
Another concern is that the sole exemption is a “medical emergency,” which is defined in state statutes, Wetterneck said.
“You basically have to be dying or have some type of irreversible harm that’s going to come from you within a 24-hour time period in order for a medical emergency to happen,” Wetterneck said. “There are no exceptions for whether severe fetal anomalies are present or not.”
Medical professionals are also concerned about the 20-week limit in Lazich’s bill, which is defined as beginning on the date of fertilization. This standard isn’t used by OB/GYNs, who date a pregnancy from the woman’s last menstrual cycle, one to two weeks before fertilization. In fact, women themselves often don’t know the exact date they became pregnant, but can provide a range of dates within which she could have conceived.
“A woman might be two weeks off from when it’s legal to when it’s illegal,” Dr. Douglas Laube, professor and physician in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told reporters on a media call organized by PPAWI. “Those two weeks might make the difference between a felony and a legal procedure.”
Wetterneck said the 20-week mark is typically when fetal anomalies show up on routine ultrasounds. She said that if Lazich’s ban is passed, a woman who was very concerned about fetal anomalies might ask for an ultrasound before 20 weeks, even though it might not be accurate and not help her to make an informed decision about continuing with her pregnancy.
“I think this could actually result in women looking for abortions before 20 weeks without having the full understanding of what could be wrong with the fetus,” Wetterneck said. “That’s really an unintended consequence of this legislation but one that is real and has real consequences for women and their families.”
A Tough Decision
Although the number of abortions performed after 20 weeks is small, the bill would have a huge impact on women seeking later abortions and the doctors who provide them.
According to a fact sheet provided by PPAWI, just 1% of all abortions in Wisconsin are performed after 20 weeks. The group says that women who seek later abortions do so because while they very much want to have the baby, the fetus has severe abnormalities and would have grave difficulties surviving outside of the womb, if they survive childbirth. Under the Lazich bill, these women would not be able to obtain an abortion unless their lives were in imminent risk.
Married mother-of-three Ginger is one of the women who would have been affected by Lazich’s ban. Ginger was pregnant with her fourth child when she discovered at her routine 26-week ultrasound that her unborn daughter was severely hydrocephalic and had a cyst on the inside of her skull, preventing her brain from growing. Doctors told her that her daughter, if she and Ginger survived the high-risk pregnancy and childbirth, would never recognize her mom’s voice or know her touch. Ginger ultimately decided to call Planned Parenthood and learn more about her options. Ginger and her husband decided to terminate her pregnancy and traveled to Kansas to obtain one from Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered by a pro-life extremist in 2009.
Ginger told reporters on the PPAWI media call that she wasn’t pro-choice or pro-life until the choice to terminate her high-risk pregnancy was in jeopardy.
“No matter what you think, we did the right thing,” Ginger said. “It was between my husband and I. We had a lot of things to weigh and we did what was right for us.”
Image by Light Brigading via Flickr and a CC License
