Well, it had to happen at some point during the Trump administration, although the President himself has been uncharacteristically careful to ensure that it is Republican-majority states that are doing the heavy lifting, and not the feds.
Alabama (surprise, surprise) becomes the latest state to pass a bill banning abortion. "But that's illegal, isn't it?", you say. Well, yes, but then, that's the point. Alabama's Senate voted in the bill by a margin of 25-6 (for the record, all 25 were middle-aged white guys) in full knowledge that such a ban is illegal. A proposed amendment to allow abortion in cases of rape or incest was also voted down, albeit by a reduced margin of 21-11, leaving cases where the mother's life is at risk as the only cases where abortion would be allowed.
The point of the Alabama vote is to force the issue before the Supreme Court, in the hopes of reversing the 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade, which is the legal ruling currently disallowing abortion bans. Since Donald Trump's conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, the hope of some is that the Court is now sufficiently Republican and conservative to overturn Roe v Wade, although in a similar test earlier this year, the Supreme Court nevertheless narrowly voted to reject a similar attempt by Louisiana to ban abortions in that state, and several other states, including Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio and Georgia, have also passed this kind of "heartbeat bill".
And, however this one turns out, we won't have heard the last of it: some 16 states, mainly in the Republican heartland of the South and Midwest, are currently in the process of bringing in anti-abortion legislation.
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