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- April 9, 2024
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Donald Trump announced on Monday that he believes the issue of abortion should be left up to the states—an obvious attempt to convince voters he won’t continue to decimate reproductive rights in a second term. On Tuesday, Arizona decided that abortion should be banned in virtually all cases and that anyone who performs the procedure should face prison time.
The decision was handed down by the state’s Supreme Court, which revived an 1864 law—as in, one dating back to the Civil War—prohibiting abortion at any time during pregnancy unless it’s needed to save the life of the mother (meaning that people impregnated by rape or incest must carry the pregnancy to term). In addition to effectively banning abortion, the law states that any individual who performs the procedure could go to prison for two to five years, a chilling move that will undoubtedly lead to the closure of clinics in the state—where, until recently, pregnant people had the right to an abortion until 15 weeks of pregnancy.
While some conservatives will claim that the exception allowing termination if the mother will die is somehow proof Republicans don’t hate women and want to control their bodies, that is obviously far from true. As we’ve seen with places like Texas, where a draconian abortion law has a similar provision, these states will go to the ends of the earth to deny women medical care. “We will see more women who are told to wait in the parking lot or go back home until they are sicker, closer to death, to receive health care,” Jill Habig, president of the Public Rights Project, told The Washington Post.
The law cannot be enforced for 14 days, giving Planned Parenthood Arizona—a party to the case—the opportunity to raise issues of constitutionality with a lower court. More than half a million people in the state have reportedly signed a petition to get abortion access on the Arizona ballot in November; if the proposed measure were to pass, the right to an abortion through about 24 weeks of pregnancy—and even later if there are health risks—would be enshrined in the state constitution.
The Arizona ruling comes the week after Florida’s Supreme Court allowed the state’s six-week abortion ban to go into effect (the issue will appear on the ballot this fall). And it comes just one day after Trump cynically attempted to distance himself from the Republicans who have been defeated at the ballot box over their abortion views—
even though, as the ex-president regularly proclaims, he was responsible for the killing of Roe v. Wade and would undoubtedly pose a terrifying threat to abortion access in a second term.
After the ruling was announced, Joe Biden released a statement emphasizing how it would ruin countless lives. “Millions of Arizonans will soon live under an even more extreme and dangerous abortion ban, which fails to protect women even when their health is at risk or in tragic cases of rape or incest,” he said. “This cruel ban was first enacted in 1864—more than 150 years ago, before Arizona was even a state and well before women had secured the right to vote.”
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