Alright, so not quite a year ago, I moved from the Atlanta, Georgia area to Raleigh, North Carolina. I left before Georgia passed a heartbeat bill, and I didn’t want to. I have good friends and family in Atlanta. I liked my community. I had my life set up there. You know. With normal stuff. Like banks and favorite grocery stories and a reproductive endocrinologist.
Oh, what, don’t you see a reproductive endocrinologist as part of your established medical care team in your hometown?
Actually, I hope for your sake that you do not. For me, it’s part of a six-year-plus infertility nightmare. Before you ask: no, I have never had a successful pregnancy. But you know what a six-year infertility journey does get you? A whole hell of a lot of sex education. (Something which is sorely lacking in the U.S. and often abysmal when it does happen.)
But I digress. The point of this blog is…well…WTF, Georgia? I think I’m leaving a place I totally love and what happens not a year later? The state passes a damned heartbeat bill? Now Georgia bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected? Are you f*cking kidding me? Wow. I’ve never been so glad to say good riddance to anywhere I’ve lived. I mean, I thought North Carolina had some pretty backward laws (see the 2016 “bathroom bill”). But a federal judge recently struck down its super old law that bans abortions after 20 weeks. #keepmovingtowardthelightNC
The Heartbeat Bill
Now, in case you don’t know what this is all about, “heartbeat bills” like the one Georgia’s stupid-conservative governor, Brian Kemp, just signed into law, are all the rage right now among conservative politicians. In fact, Georgia is the fourth state to sign in a law like this, and apparently, others are on the way!
The ridiculous idea behind a “heartbeat bill” is that a fetus is a child as soon as its heart starts beating, therefore, it is murder to abort a fetus after it has a detectable heartbeat.
In Georgia, the specific language of the heartbeat bill is this:
No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if an unborn child has been determined in accordance with Code Section 31-9B-2 to have a detectable human heartbeat except when:
(1) A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists;
(2) The probable gestational age of the unborn child is 20 weeks or less and the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest in which an official police report has been filed alleging the offense of rape or incest. As used in this paragraph, the term ‘probable gestational age of the unborn child’ has the meaning provided by Code Section 31-9B-1; or
(3) A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that the pregnancy is medically futile.
HB 481, Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act
The heartbeat bill defines terms like “medical emergency” and “medically futile” further, but basically, what this says is that if you can hear a heartbeat, you can’t abort the baby. And guess what?
Heartbeats can be detected as early as six weeks.
That’s only about two weeks after your missed period (assuming you have regular periods to miss). So it’s earlier than a lot of women even find out they are pregnant.
So what’s the result of this six-week time limit? Forced pregnancy. With a couple of exceptions here and there. Thankfully, Georgia did make ectopic pregnancy an exception. And also children who are the result of rape. Because the conservatives who signed this bill are totally willing to murder those children. After all, rape is abhorrent.
Side note: rape is abhorrent. But that double standard is ridiculous and indicative of a power-hungry mindest that seems to center around women as property owned by men. Think about it. What makes the baby born of rape less deserving of life? Personally, I think these dumbasses who pass the heartbeat bills are so misogynist that they think of rape as what happens when a beast sullies an otherwise “perfectly good” woman. Oh, you thought they cared about rape because they respected our bodies? No. They care about it because they see us as chattel and they like to own nice things.
But back to the heartbeat bills. The long and short of it is this:
Heartbeat bill = forced pregnancy bill.
Yeah. In 2019. In the United States. But then again, does this surprise us? Our frickin’ president never did apologize for talking about how he liked to “grab women by the pussy,” and you know what conservative women said about that? “It’s just locker room talk.” “Boys will be boys.”
Now, I’m guessing that if you’re reading this blog, you’re already pretty on board with a feminist agenda. But suppose you need ammunition for a fight you want to have with someone who supports one of these bills. Here are some things you might have to contend with:
“This isn’t a forced pregnancy bill. A woman should know she’s pregnant by the time six weeks roll around.”
No. There are many very very good reasons why a woman may not know she’s pregnant before six weeks, and a very good article about this recently appeared in CNN. Read it for more information on that.
“Abortion is always murder. I’m against it under any circumstance. Except when the woman’s life is at risk, obviously, and this bill includes that exception.”
The bill does include an exception, but since there are major major repercussions to violating the bill–like losing a medical license or potentially being charged with homicide–it also encourages doctors to err on the side of not allowing the abortion.
Also, doctors are not all created equally. Are you happy with every doctor you go to? What happens when you think your doctor has it wrong? Do you go to another doctor to get a second opinion? Well, guess what, when mom’s life is at risk because of a pregnancy, going to get a second opinion may not be an option. That woman will be in the hands of one doctor, and the power dynamic there will not at all be even. In a state like Georgia, politics are very likely to make it into a procedure room, and that means women are going to die because of this bill. Are you okay with that? To protect a fetus that wouldn’t even be viable outside the body of that woman you just sentenced to death? (Gosh, I hope it’s not you one day.)
“I don’t care what you think. Once there’s a heartbeat, it’s a human. And I am against murdering humans.“
Well, first of all, you might want to step back and ask yourself where you got that idea from if you feel that way. The church has politicized the pro-life/pro-choice fight has been extremely politicized by the church for many years…but not forever. For more information on that, read Shameless, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a book I recently wrote a review about.
But also, here’s where I think my six-years of infertility problems give me some insider info. I am pro-choice, but when you’re trying to get pregnant through means such as in-vitro fertilization, you get acquainted with the process of having your eggs harvested and then fertilized with sperm collected from your partner.
That fertilization process happens outside your body in a lab, and if it goes successfully, an embryologist will call you up and tell you how many fertilized embryos you have. Then a few days later, you’ll find out that some percentage of those have already died. Most won’t make it to the 5- or 6-day “blastocyst” stage, which is how long some doctors want your embryos to survive before they’ll transfer them back to your body.
But hopefully, you’ll have one or two that can be transferred back, and so that reproductive endocrinologist you found will thread those back up into your uterus and then send you home with a “good luck,” and you’ll spend the next two weeks hoping that the embryos implant.
News flash: implantation isn’t a guarantee.
I have only ever had one embryo implant. It was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me. But I’m not sure I’ve ever been as angry as the moment when another woman told me her doctor used to say, “it’s not a baby until the heart beats.” At the time, I was pretty angry at this woman for that. I didn’t realize until later that she, too, had struggled with getting pregnant. Then I was incredibly angry at the doctor.
Because talk about a way to invalidate a pregnancy! I mean, my husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for what felt like years, and from my perspective, every embryo we had was a life. That embryo that had implanted in me was a baby in my mind. A human who I already loved, regardless of the heartbeat. And I mourned that baby after I miscarried. Even though we never did hear a heartbeat.
You’re probably wondering why I feel this invalidates the heartbeat bill. After all, I essentially just told you that I feel my embryos are all lives, regardless of the heartbeat. But that’s the point. We enter the world in an extremely delicate, precarious, dangerous way. Most embryos don’t make it. Only survivors implant. Only the survivors of those get born. But all require a woman’s body to inhabit until then. No woman, no baby.
And no old white man deserves the right to decide for me when my embryo becomes a baby.
So I am deeply, deeply offended that these old white male conservative politicians have taken that right from any woman. Who are they to tell me that my baby doesn’t count until the heart beats? Who are they to tell some other woman that an embryo she didn’t even know was there is a baby and that she must now carry it to term or else? Who are these men to bring their antiquated ideas into our doctor’s offices and procedure rooms? Who are they to decide how to manage my health and the health of another life that cannot survive without me?
Answer: they are no one. They don’t have that right.
The heartbeat bills won’t stand.
Thankfully, the courts will overturn most of these bills. Roe v. Wade does still stand. There will be legal battles over this. And nothing goes into effect immediately. So don’t panic yet. We don’t need to worry that more women will die tomorrow or that the government will force them into pregnancies they don’t want. It’s not in effect today. We still have time to change things.
Also thankfully, these things don’t go unnoticed. Georgia, for example, is already facing major backlash from the filming industry, which has brought millions of dollars into the state.
But you know, we have got to get ourselves in order. It is completely unacceptable that we live in an information- and technology-rich era, that we have access to all kinds of resources, and that we still have these old white men trying to put laws like this into place. What is their problem? When can we get them out of office? How soon? Because this has to stop.
Heartbeat bills and other similarly stupid legislation are such an incredible waste of time and resources, and they do so much harm to so many people. Come on, folks. Let’s solve real problems. We need to make good health care accessible and affordable to everyone. We need to prevent school shootings. We need to handle our student debt. We need to protect our climate. Those are real issues.
Conservative Republicans: please get your hands out of my womb and get your head out of your ass, and start doing your job. We have actual problems to solve.
Love,
Weslie Ashe
