Abcarian: The anti-abortion gang that couldn’t shoot straight has lost again.
“It may take years to make a woman regret getting an abortion,” said the Rev. Michael Sherrard of the American Life League. “You have to do a lot of explaining.”
He’s not wrong, but Sherrard and his followers aren’t the only ones. Antiabortion advocates are getting tired of winning. To them, “safe, legal and rare” has become a battle cry. Even when there’s something to win, they seem to lose.
The state of Arizona recently won a court case legalizing abortion by legalizing a procedure that used to be illegal in the state, except in cases of rape and incest. The Court also struck down a state law that allowed elective abortions in cases of disability.
So Arizona is “the first state to legalize abortion” because it “routed” a law against them.
No, they haven’t. They haven’t won anything yet. But they have managed to get their voices heard.
In March 2001, Arizona legislators gave a bill making it illegal for anyone to use ultrasound equipment to assess an embryo’s viability. The law passed in a state dominated by Republicans who feared the bill would bring in so-called “experts” from abortion providers.
They never came — they were busy recruiting abortionists to lobby against the bill.
But a few weeks after it passed, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer announced that she would sign the bill. The governor and other Republicans were not interested in using ultrasound technology to make abortion legal. So their only option was to make it more difficult for women to access abortions with one-week waiting periods.
So, the state won its case.
The Anti-Choice Lobby then fought back with a lawsuit claiming that the law was unconstitutional because it imposed an “undue burden” on the right to abortion. The court ruled that it was unconstitutional — although it did so by granting a broad right to abortion.
In a unanimous decision, the court said it would overturn previous lower court rulings by ruling that the law was an unconstitutional restriction on abortion