5 Serious Consequences Awaiting North Dakota If Republicans Ban All Abortions Under ‘Personhood’

Last week, the North Dakota legislature passed the most stringent abortion ban in the nation, cutting off access to reproductive services after just six weeks of pregnancy — before some women even know they’re pregnant. But Republicans in the state aren’t stopping there. The legislature is also considering even more stringent “personhood” measures, which would endow fertilized eggs with the full rights of U.S. citizens and outlaw absolutely all abortion services.

Two personhood bills — Senate Bill 2303 and Senate Concurrent Resolution 4009 — have already passed the Senate, and the GOP-controlled House is expected to take them up sometime this week. But if North Dakota successfully enacts a total abortion ban, there will be serious consequences for the state that extend even beyond women’s reproductive freedom. Here are five ways the state will suffer under personhood:

1. There will be fewer doctors in the state available to provide medical care. In a historic move for the North Dakota Medical Association, the nonpartisan organization has come out against personhood. The group points out that the anti-abortion measures go too far to “interfere with the physician practice,” and they suspect it will be harder to find qualified medical professionals willing to practice in North Dakota if the state imposes so many complicated restrictions on doctors. Some doctors have already testified before state lawmakers to say they will leave North Dakota if the abortion bans pass.

2. Maternal health care will be compromised. Doctors could be charged with criminal negligence if anything happens to an embryo — which could prevent them from making quick decisions that could help save women’s lives. The tragic case of Savita Halappanavar, a woman who died after being denied an abortion in a Catholic hospital because her doctors were reluctant to provide care that could get them in trouble with the law, highlights the serious consequences of state lawmakers coming between a woman and her doctor.

3. Women could be forced to resort to illegal abortion procedures. Under a personhood law, women will end up resorting to dangerous “backroom” abortions, one former pediatrician warned North Dakota lawmakers last week. That Fargo-area doctor did his medical training before Roe v. Wade, when women were dying of bacterial infections after botched abortion procedures — and he warns that the passage of the proposed personhood measures would pull North Dakota back into “the stone age of medicine.” There’s evidence to back up that claim. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the legality of abortion has absolutely no correlation to abortion rates around the world, because women will continue to seek to terminate pregnancies regardless of the law.

4. Women won’t be able to use in vitro fertilization to try to have a family. Ironically, in addition to compromising medical procedures for the women seeking to terminate a pregnancy, personhood measures also place restrictions on the women who are trying to get pregnant. “These bills will stop the practice of in vitro fertilization in this state,” Dr. Stephanie Dahl, an obstetrician-gynecologist and reproductive medicine specialist in Fargo, explained to lawmakers. Doctors wouldn’t be able to perform any procedure that carries the risk of damaging some embryos, so women would be forced to travel to South Dakota or Minnesota for in vitro treatment, a six-week process that requires multiple sonograms and up to 12 visits to the doctor.

5. The state will become embroiled in expensive lawsuits. North Dakota’s six-week abortion ban already runs afoul of Roe v. Wade, and will certainly invite several costly legal challenges. A total abortion ban would lead to similar consequences. Two personhood bills were recently struck down in Oklahoma, suggesting that the courts won’t take kindly to North Dakota’s push to restrict women’s constitutional rights, either. Nevertheless, even the self-proclaimed “fiscally conservative” Republicans in the state are willing to defend their abortion bans on the state’s dime.

So far this session, Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature have successfully advanced a radical anti-abortion agenda in North Dakota — and that’s on top of the existing abortion restrictions. Women already have to undergo a mandatory 24-hour waiting period before having an abortion, and there’s just one last abortion clinic left in the entire state.

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South Dakota Now Permits Teachers To Carry Guns In Classroom

On Friday, South Dakota become the first state to enact legislation, in the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, explicitly authorizing teachers and staff in K-12 schools to carry firearms. The measure “leaves it up to school districts to decide whether to allow armed teachers” and requires those who wish to carry guns to “undergo training similar to what law enforcement officers receive.”

Still, the approach, championed by the National Rifle Association as a means to protect students in mass shootings, was widely opposed by school administrators and teachers themselves, who said the legislature missed an opportunity to engage in a broader discussion about gun violence and prevention. The educators don’t expect too many districts to take advantage of the new option:

Educators interviewed earlier this week remained unconvinced the legislation is needed.

Don Kirkegaard, superintendent of the Meade School District, said he has never been in favor of the bill and would have preferred a summer study session on school safety.

“We should be looking at the big picture and that may be part of the big picture, but it’s not something I’m going to promote,” he said.

Kirkegaard said a study session would have allowed educators to explore everything from facility designs to fire safety, all of which play a key role in safety. Such a session would have brought together “all of the players” for a more comprehensive safety plan, he said.

“I just wish … everybody would have talked a little bit together before we started passing legislation,” he said. “I don’t believe there will be very many districts, at least to begin with, who are going to jump at putting sentinels in a school until they’ve done a lot of research.”

South Dakota is not alone in allowing teachers to bring guns into the classroom. Utah permits concealed carry in public schools and several school districts in Texas also allow firearms in the classroom. In the months following the Newtown tragedy, “legislatures in other states, including Georgia, New Hampshire and Kansas, are working on measures similar to South Dakota’s.”

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Chipping Away At Roe: Arkansas And North Dakota Advance ‘Fetal Pain’ Abortion Bans

So far this year, GOP lawmakers in Arkansas and North Dakota have practically tripped over each other to see which state can introduce more anti-abortion legislation. Among other abortion restrictions, each state is currently advancing a “fetal pain” measure to outlaw abortion procedures after 20 weeks of pregnancy — based on the scientifically disputed notion that fetuses can feel pain at that point — despite the fact that similar laws have been blocked in court for running afoul of the reproductive rights granted under Roe v. Wade.

On Monday, state senators in both Arkansas and North Dakota approved 20-week abortion bans. Neither measure makes an exception for the health of the woman, despite the fact that women who seek late-term abortions often do so because they discover unexpected health issues or fatal fetal abnormalities. Arkansas’ measure does include narrow exceptions to allow abortion services in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life — but North Dakota’s abortion ban doesn’t even make the narrowest exceptions for rape or incest.

Nebraska was the first state to pass a 20-week abortion ban under the specious logic that fetuses can feel pain during the second trimester of pregnancy. Since then, seven other states have passed similar laws, and two fetal pain measures in Georgia and Arizona are currently being blocked from taking effect.

But the possibility of an impending court challenge won’t stop anti-choice lawmakers who are insistent on slowly chipping away at women’s constitutional right to reproductive health services. Both Arkansas and North Dakota have also proposed more extreme abortion measures — a “heartbeat ban” in Arkansas that would outlaw abortion after just 12 weeks, and a “personhood” measure in North Dakota that could ban all abortions and even some forms of contraception — that go even further to circumvent Roe, which guarantees women’s right to a legal abortion until the point of viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

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South Dakota Bill Would Exclude Weekends And Holidays From 72-Hour Abortion Waiting Period

South Dakota Republicans aren’t satisfied with imposing one of the nation’s longest waiting periods for women seeking abortions. As RH Reality Check reports, the state legislature will also consider a bill that would adopt a “business hours only” definition for its waiting period: while women wait the state-mandated three days before getting an abortion, weekends and holidays won’t count toward fulfilling that quota.

South Dakota’s extreme waiting period was enacted in 2011 and has been tied up in court for the past year — but since Planned Parenthood recently decided to drop the case in order to focus their resources on more pressing attacks to women’s health in the region, it may soon take effect. But on top of the restrictive law itself, RH Reality Check points out that a new bill seeks to further clarify the strict parameters of the 72-hour waiting period:

No surgical or medical abortion may be scheduled except by a licensed physician and only after the physician physically and personally meets with the pregnant mother, consults with her, and performs an assessment of her medical and personal circumstances. [...] No Saturday, Sunday, federal holiday, or state holiday may be included or counted in the calculation of the seventy-two hour minimum time period between the initial physician consultation and assessment and the time of the scheduled abortion procedure. No physician may have the pregnant mother sign a consent for the abortion on the day of this initial consultation.

Mandatory counseling sessions and waiting periods are simply methods of limiting women’s reproductive rights, and they don’t actually help women decide whether or not to have an abortion. Women can make up their own minds, and studies show that nearly 90 percent of the women seeking an abortion already feel very confident about their decision when they first approach their doctors. Unnecessary roadblocks that attempt to shame them out of having the voluntary medical procedure don’t actually work, and simply end up creating outsized barriers for low-income women who may not be able to make multiple trips to a health clinic.

Excluding weekends and holidays from South Dakota’s unnecessary waiting period puts an even bigger burden on women seeking reproductive care, and there’s no good justification for it. RH Reality Check notes that no other state with this restrictive policy defines their waiting period in this way.

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