Just when we thought we could breathe easy after John Kasich’s veto of Ohio’s heartbeat bill, it looks like this monstrosity is about to be resurrected at the federal level.
Janet Porter, the religious right nutburger who has pushed the heartbeat bill for five years, told Gordon Klingenschmitt that when she comes to Trump’s inauguration, she will meet with Republican congressmen to put the finishing touches on a federal version of her pet project. During the campaign, Porter appeared on a podcast organized by New Apostolic Reformation “prophetess” and nutcase Cindy Jacobs and announced that Congressman Steve King has already promised to sponsor a federal version of that bill.
Porter thinks that as technology improves, a federal heartbeat bill would effectively ban most abortions in this country. She claims that a heartbeat can be detected 18 days into a pregnancy—although, as most of us know, that’s dependent on a lot of factors that vary from woman to woman. Even without that to consider, the only way a heartbeat can be detected that early is via a horribly invasive vaginal ultrasound.
There’s another problem with this bill—it’s founded on bad math. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Shelley Moore Capito will likely break ranks to oppose this bill. It’s unclear whether this is a bridge too far for the three anti-abortion Democrats in the Senate–Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and Bob Casey. But even if all three of them support this bill, at most it only has 52 votes–eight short of breaking an all-but-certain filibuster. And of course, this bill is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
That doesn’t mean we can’t let up, though. We have to do everything possible to ensure this monstrosity never becomes law.