While several states have even more extreme abortion restrictions, including banning abortion from the point of conception, Georgia’s includes a uniquely terrifying clause: It recognizes an embryo or fetus as a person after six weeks of pregnancy.
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The termination, or suspected termination, of a pregnancy after the six-week point could be considered murder under Georgia’s law. And although there is an exception for miscarriage in H.B. 481, abortion and miscarriage are medically indistinguishable. This means the law empowers officials to scrutinize, surveil and criminalize not only women seeking abortion care, but also women with wanted pregnancies.
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“If a woman were to go to another state to seek abortion care, she could still be prosecuted here for conspiracy to commit murder or murder,” state Sen. Jen Jordan, who is challenging Carr as the Democratic nominee for attorney general, told HuffPost. “Medication abortions, in terms of how they present, look exactly like naturally occurring miscarriages, meaning women are going to be investigated for miscarriages.”
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A handful of New Hampshire Supreme Court judges warned about the dangers of recognizing fetal personhood in their dissenting opinion. … If fetal personhood were recognized by the government, the judges argued, it would allow the state to “govern such details … as her diet, sleep, exercise, sexual activity, work and living environment, and, of course, nearly every aspect of her health care,” encompassing “the mother’s every waking and sleeping moment.”
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