The Strict Abortion Ban that Abortion Foes Fear
Mother Jones
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Last month, a Kansas Republican promised that his state House committee would consider a bill banning abortions after the fetus has a detectable heartbeat—around the sixth week of development. The legislator, Steve Brunk, said he is confident the measure will pass in the GOP-controlled legislature. And Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has never vetoed an abortion bill.
Many anti-abortion activists are cheering Brunk on. But one voice is noticeably absent: that of Kansans For Life, the state’s most influential anti-abortion group. When asked, last week, if Kansas For Life supports the so-called heartbeat bill, the group’s legislative director hung up the phone.
Like a bill introduced in Oklahoma and another coming soon in Alabama, the Kansas bill would ban abortion far earlier than is constitutional. (In fact, it would prohibit abortion before most women even know they are pregnant.) Supporters say, that’s the point. The bans are meant to challenge Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a right to abortion. But the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion group and the parent group of Kansans For Life, has spent years trying to convince anti-abortion lawmakers that heartbeat bills could actually lead to a Supreme Court decision expanding abortion rights.
“The Supreme Court, as it is constituted right now, may not be ready to overturn Roe,” says James Bopp, the chief counsel for the National Right to Life Committee. Provoking such a direct confrontation, Bopp tells Mother Jones, could end in a decision that puts the right to abortion on firmer legal ground than Roe. And that “would be a powerful weapon in the hands of pro-abortion lawyers that would jeopardize all current laws on abortion,” Bopp has warned.
Heartbeat bill supporters are unfazed. “There are ten things that God carved into stone,” says Janet Folger Porter, an anti-abortion activist who wrote the first heartbeat bill, which was introduced in Ohio in 2011. “And one of them was not, ‘Thou shalt be erudite about not killing babies.'”
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