The answer is never. I don't know what's in the Georgia law, but I am extremely confident that there is nothing in it that would make a woman stop seeing a doctor, and I am extremely confident it would not provide the death penalty for a pregnant woman who gets an abortion. I say that without even knowing the contents of the bill. I will probably look it up to say what the bill really says, but I'm confident it is not that.
I've read the law. I've read commentaries on the law.
Basically, it's not nearly as open and shut as the whole "Ohio ectopic pregnancy" thing was, but it's mostly straightforward. It's clear enough that there is a very obvious way in which the law is interpreted, and I would be very surprised if any other interpretation of the law that a judge would uphold, at least on appeal. (You never know what kind of idiotic ruling might happen at a local level.)
The bill amends a very specific section of Georgia law, dealing with illegal abortions. Yes, in every state of the union, some abortions are illegal. I can't just set up "Dave's abortion shop", and start performing abortions. I would be arrested and jailed. The same was true in Georgia, and said that anyone performing illegal abortions could get 1 to 10 years.
What the Georgia law does is amend that section on illegal abortions to make a whole lot more abortions illegal. In fact, most abortions would be illegal. The ones that would not be illegal would be
1) anything done before a fetal heartbeat.
2) any abortion before 20 weeks, if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, and a charge was made
3) The life of the mother is in danger
4) the pregnancy is "medically futile", meaning that the baby will not survive to the end of the term.
There might be a couple of other provisions, but those are the big ones.
Remember, in the above cases, it remains legal to get an abortion. All others, which is most of them, become illegal, and subject to Georgia's illegal abortion law, which has a jail term of 1 to 10 years.
In previous rulings, it has been said that only the provider can be jailed, not the actual woman having an abortion, even if self performed.
That's the straightforward, obvious, meaning of the bill. However, there is enough other language in the bill that I could see someone arguing that it means something else entirely. It's not likely the argument would succeed, but it isn't absolutely ridiculous to suggest that it might. In other words, someone might try to insist that it really means that killing an unborn child is murder. That's where all this hype about death penalties or life in prison come from. The bill doesn't say that. However, prosecutors and judges sometimes twist the meanings of statutes into tortuous interpretations, and it is not beyond possibility that they might do so here. It's not so absolutely, incredibly, clear in the bill that there's no room for someone to try it. It is America after all, and the law says what the lawyers want it to say, when all is said and done.
You suppose? Exactly which abortions are mandatory?
