Also, I appreciate your providing a link to that article, written by:
Today’s guest author is Sarah St. Onge, who writes about child-loss, grief, and issues pertaining to continuing a pregnancy after a lethal anomaly has been diagnosed. You can read more of her work atshebringsjoy.com. She’s also asavethe1.comboard member and founder oflimbbodywallcomplex.net, a pro-life, diagnosis-specific website which supports parents who continue their pregnancy after receiving the same lethal diagnosis which took her daughter, Beatrix Elizabeth. You can find Sarah onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram.
[Who doesn’t seem to have any qualifications whatsoever to describe the legal implications of the Bill as it was written]
I also note that Ms. St. Onge includes links that tell us that the Bill will be amended to “clarify” this issue:
Now, IANAL, but … the language in the Bill seemed pretty unambiguous to me. Maybe you can help me better understand why it doesn’t say … what it says.
Methotrexate isn’t really an abortion drug, and would not normally be referred to as an “abortion pill”, especially since it’s an injection.
The bill is confusing, because it includes devices and drugs. I don’t know of any mail-order devices for inducing an abortion, so maybe that’s what the clarification will be.
@agzem, how would you interpret a doctor obtaining methotrexate from out of state in order to abort an ectopic pregnancy? What about a woman going out of state to get the medication (maybe that’s where the closest pharmacy is?) and bringing it back to abort her ectopic pregnancy? What if she gets the methotrexate from a mail order pharmacy?
I agree with you on that front, but you were responding to agzem’s statement that abortion pills don’t work on ectopic pregnancy. I think that’s correct at least.
It’s certainly possible that the reactionary misogynists who are proposing this wording for this bill don’t know enough about the subject. That is, they only think of RU486 as an abortifacient, not realizing that methotrexate can be used that way, too.
They are idiots and politicians, not doctors. There was that idiotic politician in Ohio(?) who wanted to require that ectopic pregnancies get re-implanted in the uterus.
I assume their focus on ectopic pregnancies is to make it harder to say “I got an abortion because it was an ectopic pregnancy” even when it wasn’t.
I understand what you’re saying but a pill used to terminate an ectopic pregnancy is pretty much ipso facto an abortion pill.
Whether or not the anti-choice crowd knew, knows, or understands that is functionally irrelevant, IMHO, because a Court of law would have to decide the intent of the law, and the law seemed pretty clear as written.
If you’re saying, OTOH, that the anti-choice crowd is basically being fleeced – asked to believe one thing while the law clearly says another, then … while that’s possible … it’s even sadder.
The bill could have been written better because an ectopic pregnancy is not legally considered an “abortion” but currently this is still just a proposed bill. The author of the bill says he will introduce an amendment to clarify the issue with ectopic pregnancies.
Wait, what? Terminating an ectopic pregnancy is definitely considered an abortion.
If the law uses some specific defined term for an abortion, maybe you should show that, and then also explain why terminating an ectopic pregnancy changes a class B felony to a class A.
Overwhelmingly, these people are more evil than stupid. My supposition would be that they knew they might get caught and were ready to throw away a provision or two of the Bill in order to look:
To the hardliners like they took a principled stand, and
To some of the moderates like they were willing to compromise
But they got caught.
There really isn’t much functional slop or ambiguity in this bill. It’s misogynistic and at least situationally anti-life on its face.
This whole FUBAR shows how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
My whole premise is that the management of a pregnancy is something between a woman and her doctor. I personally would be tearing up the place if there was a contingent of politicians in the exam room with me and my doctor.
An ectopic pregnancy is fatal to the embryo. Too often, it is diagnosed because the fallopian tube has ruptured and the woman’s life is threatened by internal bleeding. Surely there are medical libraries with preserved ruptured fallopian tubes and expired embryos that can be hauled out and passed among members of the Missouri legislature so they can be educated as to what they are talking about.
Doctor-patient confidentiality should protect the woman who experiences an ectopic as she discusses the best way to handle it. Where in the Hell is the Legislature getting its information (half-baked of course) about this treatment? Who is blabbing?
What’s next? Maybe the Missouri Legislature would like to “butt in” on colonoscopies and determine if it is morally acceptable to remove pre-cancerous polyps?
The law, on its face, makes it illegal to “traffic” drugs and devices that are used to perform abortions that are “in violation of any state of federal law.” So, in less I’m missing something, the legality (or not) of the abortion itself is defined/determined somewhere else in state and federal law. That is, the statute would make it illegal to supply to drugs used to perform an otherwise illegal abortion.
Presumably the purpose of that is really to impose liability on drug/device manufacturers and distributors (and deter them). (I assume the practitioner faces more significant liability for performing the illegal abortion).
But the statute then sets forth 6 aggravating factors that make it a class A felony, and all of the others sort of make sense (large volumes, repeat offenders, etc.). But why would performing an illegal abortion for an ectopic pregnancy be singled out?