Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday that would make abortion illegal except in medical emergencies. Women who perform the procedure for other reasons can be punished with fines of up to US$100,000 (R$465,000) and 10 years in prison.
The local House, controlled by the Republican Party, approved the project by 70 votes to 14. Last year, it was also approved by the Senate. Now, it goes to the governor’s sanction, the Republican Kevin Stitt – who must approve it. He had already said he would support any bills to ban abortion that came to his table.
Oklahoma’s abortion ban, if not vetoed by the courts, would expand the swath of US territory where the right to terminate a pregnancy has been suppressed. The state had become a destination for women from Texas, which last year passed the most restrictive legislation on the subject in the entire country.
“If it goes into effect, the bill would be devastating to Oklahoma residents and Texans alike,” said Tamya Cox-Touré, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma. “Nearly half of the patients that Oklahoma centers are currently seeing are ‘medical refugees’ from Texas.”
An investigation by the American newspaper The New York Times helps to measure the connection between the states: in the last week of September of last year – therefore, four weeks after the Texas law came into force -, one of the main clinics in Oklahoma, the Trust Women , had received 110 patients from Texas since the beginning of the month. In August, the previous month, that figure was just 11.
The measure passed this Tuesday, one of many pending in the state legislature, says that a person should not perform or even attempt to perform an abortion, except to save the life of a pregnant woman in serious health condition. Unlike the law passed in Texas, however, it does not reward civilians who are willing to report clinics.
Other Republican-ruled states have also passed restrictive measures in recent years.
The US Supreme Court is due to decide by the end of June whether a Mississippi law that bars abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation remains in effect. If the legislation is seen as constitutional, it will open space for more states to adopt such rules and, in practice, will change the understanding of the highest American court on the matter.
Abortion was legalized in the US in the case known as Roe v. Wade, based on the constitutional right to privacy. The understanding was that it would not be up to the government to interfere in a woman’s decision to maintain a pregnancy or not.
In 1992, the court updated its position and began to consider the concept of fetal viability: women can abort without restrictions until the moment the fetus is able to survive outside the uterus, which usually tends to happen after 22 weeks.
