The Abortion Restriction That’s Too Extreme for Most Pro-Lifers
Earlier this month, lawmakers in Kansas ended this session’s debate over abortion on a surprisingly low-key note. The Republican leadership shepherded two minor tweaks to existing abortion policies through the legislature, while staving off a far more contentious measure: a bill that would criminalize abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The bill’s advocates say they are confident it would have passed, had it reached the floor; Kansas has strong anti-abortion majorities in both houses of the legislature and pro-life crusader Sam Brownback in the governor’s mansion. But the Republican leadership, prompted by the state’s most powerful pro-life group, Kansans for Life, used a legislative loophole to keep their more radical colleagues from attaching the fetal heartbeat proposal.
Why, in a state where nearly every strain of anti-abortion restriction has taken root with ease, are advocates of the fetal heartbeat ban facing such stiff opposition from their fellow abortion opponents? Similar battles played out in Ohio and Alabama this spring, where fetal heartbeat bills were introduced in Republican-controlled legislatures, only to be quashed by the leadership.
These struggles typify a deepening fissure in the pro-life movement. The largest and most powerful anti-abortion organizations are, by and large, incrementalists who favor precisely tailored laws designed to make abortion inaccessible—by closing clinics or creating hurdles for women seeking the procedure—but also stand up to court review. Texas’s law requiring abortion doctors to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals, a relatively mundane-sounding constraint that has nevertheless managed to close nearly two-dozen clinics in less than a year, is an example of this type of legislation.
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