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Abortion opponents have a new weapon of choice: the “heartbeat bill.” A coalition of anti-abortion groups told the Associated Press last week last week that it was pushing to enact laws in all 50 states that would make women listen to a fetus’s heart beat before they could abort. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has introduced a similar federal bill, The Heartbeat Informed Consent Act, in Congress.

When the Supreme Court decided Roe, critics of abortion vowed to get it overturned. They have not succeeded in that. But they have managed to pass a wide array of laws — some upheld by the courts, others struck down — making access to abortion more difficult. The Supreme Court has ruled that states can impose some restrictions, such as 24-hour waiting periods and parental consent requirements, but has struck down others, such as laws forcing women to notify their spouses. The heartbeat laws are the latest effort in a decades-long campaign that — as conservatives gain strength at the state level—appears to be gaining ground.

Recently, abortion opponents have been pushing some tough new restrictions — and prompting lawsuits over whether they go too far. Five states — Indiana, Kansas, Alabama, Idaho, and Oklahoma — have adopted laws that ban almost all abortions after the five-month mark. Meanwhile, Ohio is considering enacting the most extreme anti-abortion law in the nation. Its House of Representatives has voted for a bill that would ban all abortions once a heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks. That is a frontal assault on Roe, which recognized a right to abortion until “viability,” the point — around the 22nd week — when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The new heartbeat bills don’t go quite as far — they would simply require abortion providers to make the fetus’s heartbeat audible to a woman seeking an abortion. Supporters argue that making the woman listen to the heartbeat — or look at an ultrasound image of the fetus, as Bachmann’s bill also requires — is important for true “informed consent.” They also believe that women who are provided with this kind of information are less likely to end their pregnancies. According to Bachmann, a poll by Focus on the Family, a group opposed to abortion, found that when women who were undecided about whether to end a pregnancy were shown an ultrasound of the fetus, 78% did not have the abortion.

Abortion rights advocates, however, insist that the heartbeat bills are an attempt to interfere with women’s right to make private medical decisions. They argue that the state has no business trying to lobby patients about medical procedures, or to turn doctors into government mouthpieces. At the moment, popular opinion is sharply divided on whether the state should require women to confront evidence of a fetus’s development. A Gallup poll in July found that 50% of those surveyed supported laws requiring women to be shown ultrasound images of their fetuses, while 46% were opposed.

But critics of these bills scored an important win in August, when a federal judge struck down parts of a new Texas law requiring women seeking an abortion in most cases to view a sonogram and listen to the fetal heart beat. Judge Sam Sparks ruled that the Texas law — which Gov. Rick Perry helped to push through the legislature — violated the First Amendment. “The act compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree,” he said. The issue could end up in the Supreme Court. http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/17/the-next-abortion-battleground-fetal-
heartbeats/ gotta give 'em credit for being imaginative; ever since Roe, they've found more and more ways to make abortion more difficult, if not actually impossible. They've got many tactics, and now "supportive Pregnancy centers":

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The centers are typically Christian charities, often under the umbrella of one of three national groups: Care Net, Heartbeat International and the U.S. National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. No one can say precisely how many pregnancy centers there are, since some aren't affiliated with any national group. Care Net puts the figure at around 2,300, though that does not include traditional maternity homes, adoption agencies or Catholic Charities. Care Net and Heartbeat International also operate Option Line, a 24/7 call center based in Columbus, Ohio, that women can contact for information and referral to a CPC near them. Last year Care Net spent $4 million on marketing, including more than $2 million on billboards alone (PREGNANT AND SCARED? 1-800-395-HELP. WE'RE HERE 24/7). The Internet has become a tool for outreach as well. Care Net has got into bidding wars with abortion providers over who would receive top placement in the sponsored-links sections on Yahoo! and Google when someone searches for abortion.

Much of the antiabortion movement remains focused on changing laws, tightening restrictions one by one, state by state. But Wood and her team talk of changing hearts. They are part of a whole other strategy that is more personal and more pastoral, although to some people it's every bit as controversial. What critics challenge are the means, the information these centers give, the methods they use and the costs they ignore.

About half of American women will face an unplanned pregnancy, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, and at current rates more than one-third will have an abortion by the time they are 45. Since Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, no other issue has so contorted U.S. politics or confounded values.

In the past 10 years, as public funding for family planning has stalled, unplanned pregnancy rates have jumped 29% among poor women; they are now more than four times as likely to have abortions as richer ones. Pregnancy centers offer everything from emergency food and formula to strollers and baby clothes to help with the month's rent. "We're willing to offer $200, $300, $400 on the spot, no strings attached," says Pat Foley, who runs the Wakota Life Care Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. "No life should end because of money." While no one disagrees with that, some do wonder how much help will be available for these families in the years to come, with school, housing and health care, since according to the Guttmacher Institute, 3 out of 4 women contemplating abortion cite economic pressure as a reason.

The latest trend is to convert pregnancy centers into health clinics that offer free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and testing for sexually transmitted diseases. What they will not offer is referral for birth control. Married clients wanting information on contraception are referred to their own doctor or pastor. But, as Wood explains, most clients are unmarried, and "the Bible clearly states that sex outside of marriage is against God's will for our lives."

That alone is enough to discredit the centers in the eyes of many pro-choice groups, which have always argued that the best way to prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. But because promoting abstinence before marriage is a part of the CPC mission, centers are eligible for federal abstinence-education grants, which in some cases have instantly doubled or tripled their budgets. In 2005, roughly 13% of Care Net affiliates got state or federal money; their average budget was $155,000.

The growth in the movement has raised other alarms with pro-choice groups. They point out that while counselors at crisis pregnancy centers lay out the physical and psychological risks associated with abortion, they don't mention that the risk of death in childbirth is 12 times as high and that many women who get abortions experience only relief.

The movement toward "medicalizing" the centers particularly concerns groups like Planned Parenthood that define their mission as offering the most accurate information about the most complete range of reproductive options. The motive behind offering free ultrasounds, which would typically cost at least $100, is more emotional than medical, critics argue, and having them performed by people with limited training and moral agendas poses all kinds of hazards.

Last summer the U.S. National Abortion Federation published a study on the centers subtitled An Affront to Choice, which charged them with marketing themselves so that women looking for a full-service health clinic might mistakenly go to a CPC instead and be "harassed, bullied and given blatantly false information." It accused centers of focusing on women's needs through the first two trimesters but then abandoning them once obtaining an abortion becomes much more difficult. Los Angeles Democrat Henry Waxman, now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, investigated federally funded CPCs, using callers posing as pregnant 17-year-olds. The investigators reported that 20 of 23 centers they reached provided "false or misleading information about the health effects of abortion," inflating the risk of breast cancer, infertility, depression and suicide.

The heat of the national battle, however, doesn't capture what is happening on the front lines. In North Carolina, Abortion Clinics OnLine lists eight abortion providers, but the state has more than 70 pregnancy centers. NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina was so concerned about their practices that it recruited volunteers to call centers and record the information they were given. NARAL reported that in the course of promoting abstinence, a counselor told an investigator that "all condoms are defective and have slots and holes in them." Another warned that "9 out of 10 couples that go through an abortion split up."
....
Asheville (NC) is "half Christian, half New Age," a town where Baptists preach about Jesus' saving grace while mystics talk about the vortex entrance panels tucked in the mountains. There are a great many churches and Presbyterian summer camps here in Billy Graham's backyard, but there is also a lively population of retirees and artists and entrepreneurs opening craft shops and microbreweries. It thinks of itself as a tolerant town--to the point that the only facility in all of western North Carolina that publicly offers abortions is the city's Femcare clinic. It has a fence around it, cameras, alarms and a security guard because it was bombed in 1999 and had its windows shot out in 2003. "It really tested me," says Lorrie, the clinic's sole abortion provider, who, given past threats, prefers that her full name not be used. "If I didn't continue, the place would close. No one wants to go into abortion providing. But it's so important. I know that I'm providing a service to women that no one else will."

Certainly not a crisis pregnancy center, she adds, and her voice takes on a tighter edge. Two days ago, she had a woman come into the clinic who was a wreck. She had seen an ad for a women's health center in Charlotte, which is two hours away, and called saying she wanted an abortion. "They said sure, we can help you," Lorrie says. "They told her she could even come in after hours so she wouldn't miss a day at work. She drove all the way to Charlotte." But when she got there, she realized her mistake. "They showed her pictures of aborted fetuses," Lorrie goes on. "She was a basket case when she got here. They had told her that if she had an abortion, she'd probably never be able to have a child." Now Lorrie is plainly furious. "These [pregnant] women are scared out of their minds," she says. "It doesn't change their minds--it just scares them. It's cruel and un-Christian to lie to patients."

Yet Lorrie's primary job makes her a target. The pregnancy-center movement may promote "loving support," but there are still other activists fighting a holy war. She had to call in a fire-department haz-mat team after an envelope arrived claiming to contain anthrax. Her neighbors were sent a newsletter with her picture: "It said, 'This woman is a killer and she lives in your neighborhood,'" Lorrie recalls. Her nurse-midwife Bonnie Frontino discovered her picture on what looked like WANTED posters all around her neighborhood; sheriffs began patrolling the area of her house. "I was really angry, but I was scared also," Frontino says. "You never know who's going to see this and think it's their moral duty to kill us." More at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1590444-1,00.html

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say instead of being an underhanded and intrusive effort to change the mind of someone seeking an abortion, something wrong was found with the developing heart and they realized the fetus wouldn't live to term anyway or complicate the pregnancy/risk the mother's life.

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I think that we need more accessible prevention controception and more options for people so they can keep and raise their babies without being in such dire economic straights.

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I'm curious if you would support a bill that mandated the observation of animal execution before people are allowed to consume meat.

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less relevant in the case of serious risk to the mother

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