Abortion Bans Can’t Be “Clarified”

Because pregnancy is too complicated

Photo by Jack Prommel on Unsplash

As more and more horror stories pop up across the country about women and little girls not being able to receive the life-saving abortion care they need in their own home states, a familiar refrain is reverberating throughout the forced-birth community: The abortion bans just need to be tweaked, and then everything will be fine.

Except that’s not how it works.

Idaho conservatives figured that out recently, even though the prochoice movement warned them again and again that bans would prove deadly. Because OBGYNs are fleeing the state due to Idaho’s abortion ban, and new doctors fresh out of medical school are refusing to to settle in states with bans, Idaho Republicans figured they needed to do something so that Idaho has enough baby doctors to serve the state. So they briefly considered adding health exceptions to the abortion ban that would clearly allow doctors to abort a pregnancy to save their patient’s lives.

But it was just too hard to do.

“The list was endless when we began considering the decisions that would fall under that language,” said Republican Rep. Julianne Young of Blackfoot, Idaho.

So what did Idaho Republicans do? Nothing. They included no new exceptions to save mother’s lives…