The Family Council has announced its legislative plans for anti-abortion and other anti-medical autonomy legislation.
In short, the abortion measures are aimed at a de facto, if not de jure abortion ban. For example, an end to pharmaceutical abortion — the pill regimen that prompts miscarriage in the earliest weeks of pregnancy — would be prohibited after the seventh week of pregnancy. This could occur after some women become aware of pregnancies.
The anti-woman game plan, full of scare propaganda and more:
Prohibit abortion based on the baby’s sex.
Prohibit chemical abortions after the seventh week of pregnancy.
Enhance penalties against abortion doctors who violate the state’s informed-consent laws.
Ensure abortion clinics are inspected and the Health Department shuts down clinics that fail inspection.
Close loopholes in the law letting doctors from out-of-state perform abortions in Arkansas.
Ensure Christian doctors, nurses, and pharmacists cannot be forced to participate in abortions.
Ensure Arkansas’ Medicaid programs do not pay for abortifacients or abortion coverage. (They don’t now, unless they are angling to prevent use of some long-term contraceptives that some claim, erroneously, act as abortion rather than contraception.)
Oppose euthanasia and assisted-suicide in Arkansas.
Continue promoting pregnancy care centers and adoption to help women choose not to have an abortion. (In other words, apply emotional pressure to women while denying them full access to medical services.)
Understand that extending ability to medical providers to refuse to participate in abortions could doom a woman in the name of a fetus, perhaps one with little survival outside the womb.
Given the status of women with the ruling Republican Party, little opposition can be expected to most of this, save perhaps a rare medical voice injecting some science to the discussion. As ever, the courts likely will be the last resort for protection of medical rights of women.