Abortion

Wyoming Kills Heartbeat Bill While Arkansas Proposes Their Own

If you strike one down, two more shall grow back in its place.

Senator Jason Rapert. (Arkansas Times)

Wyoming’s attempt to ban abortion at the point in which an embryonic heartbeat can be detected – in some cases before a woman even knows she is pregnant—has already drawn to a conclusion, as the bill failed to make it out of committee.

Via the Billings Gazette:

A House committee struck down a bill on Monday that would have made it illegal to have an abortion after a fetus or embryo heartbeat was detected…Legislators said they couldn’t support the bill because it was too constitutionally or medically vague.

That would seem like a very good reason not to create such a law, yet it’s not stopping legislators in Mississippi from bringing back their own constitutionally questionable and likewise failed Heartbeat ban, which was also blocked in committee last year. And now Arkansas is joining into the fray as well, with a Heartbeat ban of their own.  According to the Associated Press, Senator Jason Rapert has proposed the ban, which will effectively put abortion out of reach for nearly all women in the state.

Rapert, R-Conway, said he may bring the legislation before the Senate Public Health Committee as early as this week. Eighteen of the Senate’s 35 members have signed onto his proposal as co-sponsors.

“When there is a heartbeat there, you have a living human being,” Rapert said. “I believe in this nation we need to take a stand for life.”

Add Arkansas’s legislature to the ranks of states already considering the obviously unconstitutional ban this year—Ohio, Mississippi and now North Dakota, and you can truly see that for every state that stops to consider the unlikelihood that such a law will ever be put into effect, a handful more simply don’t care and will take up the “cause” anyway.