Heartbeat bill full#
But Setzler was undeterred: “Can you help me, through this bill, fully recognize them so it’s not three fifths of a person but a full person?” he asked. “The same Supreme Court, by a 7-2 decision, that didn’t recognize Dred Scott, didn’t recognize the humanity of a child in the womb and it’s our opportunity to fix that.”Īnother state legislator balked at the comparison and referenced the Three-Fifths compromise as a time when legislators dangerously intervened to decide who was human. Supreme Court in 1857 said Dred Scott was property, he wasn’t a person,” Setzler said during a committee hearing in March. Sanford decision to imply that the Supreme Court had similarly ruled incorrectly in Roe v. In the Georgia legislature, Setzler, the bill’s sponsor, cited the Dred Scott v.
And finally, the study explains, the bill’s supporters said that Georgia should be allowed to expand rights and protections to this new group as a matter of states’ rights. Then lawmakers and community members said that if fetuses were living, they were a “vulnerable” class of people who deserve rights and protections. They first asserted that a “heartbeat” was a sign of life and therefore personhood.
The study outlines three major arguments that the bill’s supporters used to advance their argument. But the arguments went further, the study says, explaining that the Georgia bill’s supporters were effectively “foreshadowing their legal strategy for a future claim before the U.S. Jen Gunter have also noted that, despite the frequently used “heartbeat” language, the cardiac activity measured at six weeks comes from a cluster of cells called the fetal pole rather than from something that looks like a heart.Įvans and her co-author, Subasri Narasimhan, a post-doctoral fellow at Emory’s Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, noted several examples of legislators and community members “misrepresenting medical science” in their support of the Georgia bill. So-called “heartbeat” bills have been controversial in part because they seek to ban abortions at a stage when many women do not yet know they are pregnant, which reproductive rights advocates say means they ban nearly all abortions. She and other researchers examined the testimony and legislative debate advocating for Georgia’s six-week abortion ban last March. “We were surprised at the references to particular progressive victories, including things like the passage of the 14th Amendment same sex marriage,” says Dabney Evans, an associate professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and co-author of the study, which may be the first systematic analysis of the political language around early abortion bans in the United States. But since President Donald Trump got elected and tipped the balance of the Supreme Court, abortion opponents have embraced the strategy. When the first “heartbeat” bill appeared in Ohio in 2011, anti-abortion groups were divided over whether to support it. The idea that fetuses deserve rights is not a new concept, but it was once considered a fairly fringe idea. Ed Setzler in a quote mentioned in the study. “If you think back to the same sex marriage debate, the state of Massachusetts recognized the franchise of marriage more expansively in Massachusetts than the minimum requirement of federal law,” argued bill sponsor and Georgia State Rep. Throughout the testimony surrounding the bill, Georgia state lawmakers and community members argued that fetuses are a class of persons entitled to protection under the law, just like black Americans and LGBT Americans. Instead of focusing on religious or women’s health concerns, supporters of Georgia’s “heartbeat” bill advanced their arguments by “co-opting the legal successes of progressive movements” such as the civil rights movement and the LGBT rights movement, according to a new study, published in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters.
0 kommentar(er)
