The assaults on women's reproductive rights just keep getting crueler.
Earlier this year, Alabama opened the proverbial reproductive flood gates after governor Kay Ivey signed the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation that argues life begins at the moment of conception, and doctors who perform abortions for cases other than extreme risk to pregnant mothers' lives will face 99 years in prison, even in cases of rape and incest.
One week before, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a similar bill that bans abortion after six weeks, a point at which doctors can usually detect a fetal heartbeat, before most women even realize they are pregnant.
Ohio governor Mike DeWine has signed a bill nearly identical to Georgia's.
Missouri advanced a bill 24-10 to criminalize abortions at 8 weeks.
In August, Planned Parenthood announced the White House compelled it to decline Title X funding intended to provide healthcare to over a million low-income women lest it be subjected to the administration's "domestic gag rule," wherein healthcare providers receiving funds for counseling patients about reproductive options that may include abortion will lose that funding if the word "abortion" is even used.
Last month, Missouri health director Randall Williams admitted the state health department had been maintaining a spreadsheet of Planned Parenthood patients containing personal information including the date of women's last menstrual periods.
Yet as bizarre and troubling as all this is, Ohio may have topped it this week.
Under the recently introduced House Bill 413, not only would abortions be criminalized, punishable by lifetime prison terms--doctors would be required to re-implant ectopic pregnancies into women's uteri.
An ectopic pregnancy is a serious condition in which an embryo implants itself in a woman's Fallopian tube rather than her uterus.
In that situation, the embryo is neither viable nor savable.
This means not only is the state of Ohio suggesting something medically unnecessary.
It's actually impossible.
"Ectopic re-implant" procedures do not exist in medical science.
In response to the bill, Ohio obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. David Hackney tweeted:
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