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A sweeping anti-abortion bill in Missouri seeks to make it illegal for pregnant people to abort ectopic pregnancies, among other restrictive measures.
The legislation,House Bill No. 2810, proposes that “the offense of trafficking abortion-inducing devices or drugs is a class A 11 felony if … The abortion was performed or induced or was attempted to be performed or induced on a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy.”
Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican who introduced the bill, heard Wednesday, seeks to criminalize the production, sale, purchase or use of medical devices or drugs used for abortions. Anyone found guilty of the following would be guilty of a class B felony, which carries a prison sentence of five to 15 years.
An ectopic pregnancy often occurs in a fallopian tube, where eggs are carried from the ovaries to the uterus, according to theMayo Clinic. The medical nonprofit states that such pregnancies “can’t proceed normally” because “the fertilized egg can’t survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.”
Mayo Clinic adds that if a “fertilized egg continues to grow in the fallopian tube, it can cause the tube to rupture,” adding, “Heavy bleeding inside the abdomen is likely.”
About 1 in every 30,000 pregnancies are ectopic, Mayo Clinicstates. However, extrauterine pregnancies occur more frequently in women receiving fertility treatments, at about every 1 in 100 pregnancies.
Dr. Colleen McNicholas, Chief Medical Officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, slammed the proposed bill in a statement, perNewsweek.
“This is what it looks like when uneducated politicians try and legislate our bodies,” she said. “Ectopic pregnancies, if not treated promptly, become life-threatening. Banning any provision of care related to ectopic pregnancies will put people’s lives at risk.”
The Show-Me State currently has onlyone legal abortion provider, a Planned Parenthood clinic located in St. Louis.
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Missouri passedone of the nation’s strictest abortion lawsin 2019, criminalizing abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy. No exceptions are made for victims of rape or incest, though exceptions are allowed for medical emergencies, such as when a mother’s life is at risk, or she is facing serious permanent injury.
That year, eight other states — Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, Utah and Alabama — passed gestational age bans limiting abortions past six, eight or eighteen weeks. Alabama legislators passed an even stricter bill that bans almost all abortions at any point in pregnancy.
Missouri’s latest anti-abortion bill arrives at a time when abortion rights are under assault across the United States. The Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which granted women the right to an abortion in every state, isat risk of being overturnedlater this year.
source: people.com
