The dozen or more conservative states which claim to have banned abortion have a substantial number of mothers murdering their preborn babies under explicit cover of law, according to an updated report released earlier this month by the Foundation to Abolish Abortion.
The nonprofit organization, which exists to advance policy that establishes equal protection of the laws for preborn babies, said in the report that over 218,000 abortions will occur this year in states with “general bans” on abortionists and other third parties conducting abortions, as well as states with “six-week bans” on abortions by third parties once a heartbeat can be detected.
The report examined available data on self-induced abortions “performed inside states where abortion is supposedly banned” and concluded that many pro-life laws are not protecting babies.
For the sixteen states with the “general bans” and the “six-week bans” in effect at the start of this year, there will be more than 30,000 in-state clinician-provided abortions, over 116,000 out-of-state clinician-provided abortions, and more than 71,000 in-state telehealth abortions conducted by out-of-state clinicians who are shielded from criminal liability in their home states.
That represents a significant increase from the approximately 181,000 abortions which were committed five years ago in the same sixteen states using those three methods.
Yet those data points exclude “all methods of self-managed abortion,” which occur outside of the formal medical system and are obtained via abortion pills supplied by community networks, online pill sellers, international telehealth clinics, and advance provision of pills, in addition to methods of murdering preborn babies such as herbal concoctions or physical force.
The report from the Foundation to Abolish Abortion warned that “because no states’ laws are considered to prohibit self-induced abortion, babies in all fifty states remain essentially unprotected from abortion.” The laws in the sixteen states which claim to have banned abortion indeed forbid officials from prosecuting mothers for the murder of their preborn children, even if they willfully choose to obtain abortions without assistance or coercion from any other party.
Many pro-life establishment leaders and prominent conservative news outlets meanwhile “rely on officially reported state abortion numbers” to make the claim that “abortions in these states have dropped near or to zero,” or even that such states are now effectively “abortion-free.”
“What headlines like these do not account for is the fact that, for all practical purposes, self-induced abortion remains legal for women in all fifty states, including those that claim to have banned abortion,” the report from the Foundation to Abolish Abortion continued. “Additionally, increasing numbers of women from states with third-party bans are traveling out-of-state to procure abortions in states where clinics are still legally operating. This means that state-reported abortion numbers in states with third-party bans have become virtually meaningless to the question of how many babies have been saved by pro-life laws.”
The lawmakers who attempt to close loopholes allowing mothers to willfully murder their babies have been opposed by senior Republicans and veteran pro-life lobbyists. Several dozen pro-life organizations published a letter two years ago claiming that “women are victims of abortion” and clarifying that the groups stand against “any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women.”
