The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade on Friday sets off a cascade of antiabortion legislation that will affect roughly half the country.
Without the landmark precedent in place, access to abortion began to change quickly. First, 13 states with “trigger bans,” designed to take effect if Roe were struck down, will prohibit abortion within 30 days. At least eight states banned the procedure the day the ruling was released. Several others with antiabortion laws blocked by the courts are expected to act, with lawmakers moving to activate their dormant legislation. A handful of states also have pre-Roe abortion bans that could be reactivated, and others moved immediately to introduce new legislation.
In 20 states and the District of Columbia, abortion has been legal and is likely to be protected.
On Friday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said he will seek an abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. While most state legislatures have adjourned for the year, some governors have expressed an interest in convening special sessions to pass additional antiabortion legislation – or to remove antiabortion laws already on the books. Abortion access in other states will depend on the midterm elections.
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States with abortion bans that will take effect within one month
Among this first wave, the antiabortion laws slated to take effect – the “trigger bans” – all work a little differently. Some activated immediately or as soon as a designated state official certified the court’s decision, while others will go into effect 30 days after the decision is announced.
While all of these laws make exceptions for the life of the mother, most do not include exceptions for rape and incest.
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States likely to ban abortion within weeks or months
In five states without trigger laws – Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and South Carolina – courts have blocked or struck down recent laws that banned most or all abortions. Without Roe, those laws will probably take effect within weeks or months.
While Indiana has not passed a strict abortion ban, the Republican-led state plans to go into special session in early July and could crack down on the procedure. Meanwhile, West Virginia, another Republican-led state, never repealed its pre-Roe abortion ban, and recently added a constitutional amendment specifying that West Virginians do not have a right to abortion.
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States where the fate of abortion rights remains uncertain
In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Democratic governors have been a firewall against antiabortion legislation proposed or passed by Republican-led legislatures. The future of abortion access will depend on the upcoming midterms: If antiabortion Republicans win those governors mansions, Republican lawmakers will have a clear path to banning abortion.
Kansas is another state to watch closely. An important access point for patients traveling from antiabortion states in the southeast, Kansas will hold a statewide referendum in August on a constitutional amendment that would eliminate abortion protections established by the state Supreme Court.
In Virginia, just hours after the Supreme Court’s decision, Youngkin said he had tasked four state lawmakers – all antiabortion Republicans – with writing legislation to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
While Florida and Arizona have passed 15-week abortion bans, which allow over 90% of abortions to continue, lawmakers in the Republican-led states might try to go further in the coming months or years.
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States where abortion is legal and likely to be protected
Many states have passed laws that explicitly protect the right to abortion, with several adding those protections this year in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision. Elsewhere, state courts have protected abortion access through state constitutions and past court decisions.
New Mexico and New Hampshire lack those explicit protections, but their state legislatures are not likely to move to ban the procedure.
(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Caroline Kitchener, Kevin Schaul, N. Kirkpatrick, Daniela Santamariña, Lauren Tierney
Governor Hochul believes that a woman should murder her baby. She should be thrown out of office.
The stated goal of the rally is to proclaim that “Abortion access is a Jewish value, plain and simple.” Its real goal, however, is to gaslight broad swaths of the country, and to provide cover for secularist elites. The rally’s organizers, sponsors and supporters wish to render the killing of a fetus a religious liberty “right” and, at the same time, promote the dangerous fiction that a rational pro-life position violates the “separation of church and state.”
In situations where termination of pregnancy is necessary to save the mother’s life, it would be offensive to claim that such a basic humanitarian concern is uniquely tied to a particular religion. Is chemotherapy a “Jewish value?” What about access to X-rays or organ transplants? The panoply of sponsors, then, are not addressing the actual underlying debate. They are rallying to demand, in the name of religion, elective feticide until the moment of birth.
According to a didactic tale, a well-meaning person once asked a rabbi, “If you were to bless a pig, would that make the animal kosher?” “No,” the rabbi replied, “but it would make me trayf (not kosher)!” Jewish values are not determined by an alphabet soup of Jewish organizations, but by an immutable and transcendent code of Jewish spirituality, ethics and law. And that Jewish code is clear that life and the soul precede birth. In Genesis, for example, Rebecca is told that her unborn twins have distinct natures (25:23). In the Prophets, G-d informs Jeremiah, “Before I placed you in the womb I knew you, before you left the uterus I sanctified you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (1:5).
Moreover, Jewish tradition insists upon adherence to the Oral Law, in which the Mishnah provides moral instruction that a mother must be saved even at the expense of her child, if necessary, “because her life precedes his life” (Ohalos 7:6). Read that again, because the NCJW, the lead sponsor of the rally, refers to this Mishnah without quoting its explicit reference to the “life” of the fetus. Inexplicably, in the same paragraph, NCJW claims that, under Jewish law, a fetus is “not yet having [a] life of its own.”
This is shocking, and shameful. Still worse, other major Jewish organizations and even “rabbinic” groups signed on as rally sponsors, despite the NCJW’s perversion of an obvious statement in Jewish law.
Every citizen has a democratic right to advocate a public policy position, but it is wrong to misuse or mistakenly invoke the First Amendment. Unfortunately, many American Jews have so utterly lost sight of that which Judaism holds dear that they have elevated their own progressive agenda to the level of faith, likely to fill a resulting spiritual void. This rally, led by those who cherry-pick, decontextualize and distort Jewish law to support their position, will draw from those ranks.
Even holding faith aside for a moment, common sense should also have its say. Visit a neonatal ICU, and you will meet babies who cannot yet breathe on their own or ingest nutrients. Yet they are learning to recognize and find comfort in familiar voices, music and their own thumbs. Doctors and nurses work around the clock to ensure that these babies go on to live normal lives. It is utterly nonsensical to argue that a fetus, in precisely the same situation during a routine pregnancy, is not alive.
The transparent and patently dishonest message of the “Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice” is that valuing life is neither a matter of common sense nor an American principle, but rather a parochially Christian tenet—and, further, a tenet that constitutes a violation of the much-ballyhooed “separation of church and state.” Balderdash. In fact, the sanctity of life and the importance of traditional morality both come directly from the Hebrew Bible. Thus, all Americans, especially of the Abrahamic religions, should reject the progressives’ position, predicated as it is upon the absurd notion that it is somehow unconstitutional for the moral values of the citizenry to be reflected in the laws that govern our society.
Murdering unborn babies is now banned in three States. Other States still allow it.