Hundreds show for Nebraska 'heartbeat' abortion ban hearing

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Legislature’s Health and Welfare Committee conducted nearly eight hours of testimony Wednesday before adjourning without a vote on whether to move forward a bill that would ban abortion at a time when before many women know they are pregnant.

Hundreds of people crowded the halls of the state Capitol for a committee hearing on what is known as a heartbeat bill.

The bill would ban abortions as soon as cardiac activity can be detected in an embryo, which is usually around the sixth week of pregnancy.

The committee took testimonies from around 100 people before its adjournment. A decision will be made at a later date about whether the invoice will be brought forward.

“This bill is about one thing: protecting babies with beating hearts from elective abortion,” Republican Senator Joni Albrecht of Thurston told the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee to testify on her bill on Wednesday begin bringing numerous supporters of the ban and hundreds of opponents to the Capitol.

Lawmakers opposed to the ban have already attempted to set up roadblocks to thwart the measure. Several attended a protest in the Rotunda shortly before Wednesday’s hearing, attended by around 300 people opposed to the ban, including medics and clergy.

Democratic Senator Megan Hunt of Omaha, who has been an outspoken opponent of restricting abortion rights, urged the crowd to continue showing up for each phase of the bill.

“We need constant, sustained, righteous outrage. They need to feel your energy,” Hunt said, shouting, “We’re never going to stop!” from someone in the crowd, followed by a roaring chant of “No more bans!”

Hunt also led a push to move the bill from the conservative-leaning HHS committee, where it will almost certainly move forward, to the more politically balanced Judiciary Committee. She and other lawmakers argued that because the proposal would criminalize most abortions, it should be heard by the Judiciary Committee.

But those efforts faltered in a vote in the Legislative Chamber last week, with supporters of the ban countering that the bill does not include criminal penalties for women performing abortions or doctors performing them. They said it would subject doctors who perform illegal abortions to professional discipline that could include losing their medical license.

Though the bill doesn’t list criminal penalties, it would leave doctors vulnerable to criminal charges under current state law, several lawmakers said. The law makes it a crime to perform an abortion that is not permitted under state law.

“I think a prosecutor, and possibly a jury, could find that if you performed an abortion that is inconsistent with medical practice – enough to cause you to lose your license – then you are also breaking this criminal statute,” said the Democratic Sen John Cavanaugh, an Omaha attorney.

He pointed to an open case in Norfolk in which prosecutors charged a 41-year-old woman with a felony for helping her 17-year-old daughter terminate her pregnancy at 24 weeks by supplying her with pills to induce an abortion.

“They’re going to look at the law and find ways to prosecute it,” Cavanaugh said.

Kacie Ware, 35, of Omaha, who detailed a day before the hearing how she requested an abortion after becoming pregnant at 16 by a man twice her age who raped her, eyed the latest attempt with suspicion Effectively banning abortion in the Red State She repeatedly started when she was 15.

Ware would not have been able to have an abortion under the currently proposed ban because she only discovered her pregnancy well past six weeks of pregnancy, she said.

“I would have done almost anything to end this pregnancy,” Ware said, risking her life to do so. “I could have died. What I do know is that an abortion ban will not end abortions. It will only end safe abortions.”

Wednesday’s hearing ended with a heated exchange of blows between Albrecht, the bill’s lead sponsor, and Omaha Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh, who is adamantly opposed to the ban.

Cavanaugh angered Albrecht about how medical providers would be able, under pain of losing their medical licenses, to prove that abortions were performed for raped women or to save the woman’s life.

Albrecht insisted the way doctors in Nebraska handle abortions will not change under the law, reiterating several times, “It’s going to be done the way it’s done today,” even though women currently have 20 weeks have to terminate a pregnancy and not have to report rape or incest to get an abortion.

At one point, the senators yelled at each other, and Cavanaugh asked, “You’re okay with women dying if this bill passes?”

“I will not make this fuss,” shot back Albrecht. “I won’t answer that.”

If enacted, Nebraska would join several other states that have enacted similar abortion bans based on cardiac activity, including Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee. Nebraska, which became the first state to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in 2010, has recently moved to enact stricter abortion restrictions.

Anti-abortion lawmakers last year tried to pass a so-called trigger law that would have automatically banned almost all abortions, even those resulting from rape and incest, once the US Supreme Court ruled Roe v. Wade, who had guaranteed the right to abortion nationwide for nearly five decades. The effort fell two votes short of the 33 votes required to overcome a filibuster.

Democrats in Nebraska’s officially bipartisan one-house legislature hold 17 of the body’s 49 seats, which in turn would cause pro-abortion advocates to miss a supermajority. But pro-choice advocates have conceded that the alliance behind last year’s filibuster may no longer believe the ban includes exceptions for rape and incest.