House Passes Cobb-Led Heartbeat Bill | Dems Shun Acworth Lawmaker

ATLANTA -- A controversial anti-abortion bill passed the state House of Representatives in the final hours of crossover day at the legislature, and House Bill 481, known as the Heartbeat Bill, now moves onto the Senate. During hours of emotional debate, some House Democrats turned their backs on the bill's primary sponsor, state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Acworth), as he spoke in favor of his bill.

The bill will protect preborn children from abortions once a heartbeat has been detected. Georgia is the 12th state to introduce such a bill this year, according to the Family Policy Alliance of Georgia.

The measure also has the full support of Gov. Brian Kemp, who said, "Georgia is a state that values life. We shield the vulnerable and shelter the innocent. This is a powerful moment in Georgia. It’s bigger than politics and partisanship. Let’s champion life today and ensure that all Georgians - including the unborn - have the chance to live, grow, and prosper."

The bill passed by a vote of 93-73.

Shortly after the vote, Family Policy Alliance of Georgia President Cole Muzio said, "Today, Georgia lawmakers stood for the innocent, for science, and for life. Our hope is that this movement continues to build toward ultimate passage here in Georgia and that it will echo around the nation toward transforming the culture.”

Read more: Anti-Abortion 'Heartbeat' Bill Introduced By 2 Cobb Legislators

NARAL Pro-Choice immediately criticized Kemp and Georgia Republicans for what it said are "efforts to criminalize abortion and punish women by passing a bill through the House that would ban abortion before most women know they are pregnant."

“Kemp and the GOP want to criminalize abortion before most women even know they are pregnant, a move that would directly endanger the lives of Georgia women,” said Laura Simmons, NARAL Pro-Choice Georgia state director. “The majority of Georgians know accessing abortion is a decision that is best left to a woman in consultation with her doctors, her family, and her faith, free from government interference. Yet, Kemp and Republican leaders have ignored that fact, instead using their time in office to push their own personal ideologies on women and families across Georgia. NARAL members will not stand by quietly as our rights are stripped so the GOP can appease their extreme base.”

House Bill 481, called the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, would only allow abortions in cases where the mother's life or health is in danger, or in cases of medical emergency. The bill also says that even an unborn child at any stage of development in the womb shall be included in state population-based counts.

Read House Bill 481 here.

With President Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, abortion foes see their best chances in years to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion in the United States, said Columbia Law School professor Carol Sanger, an expert on constitutional law and reproductive rights.

As a result, “a lot of states are feeling very gutsy” and are considering unconstitutional laws in the hope they will pave the way for a Supreme Court case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, Sanger said.

In Roe and subsequent cases, the justices held that states can’t ban abortions before a fetus is viable outside the womb. Original standards put that at around 28 weeks of pregnancy, but with the development of technology, fetuses may live outside the womb at 23 or 24 weeks of viability.

Similar heartbeat legislation by other states have failed in the past. Heartbeat bills either fail in committees or in legislative votes, are vetoed by governors (as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich did twice) or are struck down in the courts.

An Iowa state court judge dealt abortion foes their latest defeat, ruling on the 46th anniversary of Roe that what was the country’s most restrictive abortion law was unconstitutional under the state’s constitution. The judge tied it to a state Supreme Court decision the struck down another Iowa law requiring a 72-hour waiting period before an abortion, and leaving only a narrow path forward to the U.S. Supreme Court. Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said the decision wouldn’t be appealed.

The court has twice refused to hear heartbeat cases. In 2013, North Dakota was the first state to succeed in enacting a heartbeat bill. It was challenged in federal court, but the nation’s high court refused to take it. That same year, Arkansas passed a similar law, but the Supreme Court declined to hear it.

Still, the bills beat on.

“A lot of states are gunning for the honor of being the one whose case is taken by the Supreme Court,” Sanger said. “Heartbeat bills are really part of a pro-life strategy to get a case before the Supreme Court.”

As the thinking goes, Sanger said, even if the court finds a ban on abortions after a heartbeat is detected is unconstitutional under Roe, “is this an opportunity for rethinking the basic decision in Roe?”

Even with a conservative majority on the court, Florida State University Law School Professor Mary Ziegler, whose areas of specialization include the legal history of reproduction and the Constitution, doubts Chief Justice John Roberts is interested in taking on a heartbeat case, or any abortion case.

In a surprise move last month, Roberts sided with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing in a 5-4 decision that blocked a Louisiana law that would have required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The vote put the law on hold pending a full review. Roberts offered no reason for his vote, but it signaled he was unwilling to disrupt a 2016 precedent that struck down a similar law in Texas.

Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh voted to allow the law to take effect.

Ziegler said Roberts “has concerns about the legitimacy of the court and the ability to stay above the partisan fray that would make the court look political in a way that he doesn’t want.”

“Justice Roberts doesn’t want to take it on,” Sanger agreed. “He’s a conservative, but a moderate conservative. … To be chief justice, if you are a constitutional lawyer, you have died and gone to heaven. He doesn’t want the Roberts Court to be known as the court that overturned Roe.”

The bigger threats to abortion rights are the incremental changes states have made since Casey v. Planned Parenthood in 1992. The Supreme Court didn’t overturn Roe, as some abortion foes had hoped, but it was a seminal case that said states have an interest in potential life and can impose regulations on abortions from the moment of conception.

Abortion laws wending through state legislatures send a “complicated message” to people on both sides of the contentious issue, Ziegler said.

“If you’re pro-choice, you have to be vigilant about things that don’t look like obvious sweeping changes,” she said. “It’s more likely that you’ll see more slow, complicated, hard-to-process attacks on legal abortion — fetal pain laws, bans on abortion at or after the 20th week, beefed up mandatory counseling laws involving ultrasound, and laws that ban dilation and evacuation, the most common procedure after the first trimester.”

At least 26 states have passed laws that require a woman to have an ultrasound prior to an abortion: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

For abortion foes, the message is that “even with a reconfigured Supreme Court and a sympathetic president in the White House, the court is interested in preserving its reputation of being non-partisan,” Ziegler said.

Beth Dalbey of Patch’s national staff contributed to this report.

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