What do the new restrictions on abortion mean for women in the United States?

In recent weeks, the Georgian state government has pbaded one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the United States: this procedure is prohibited after six weeks of gestation. The Alabama legislature voted on May 15 to try to veto total abortion, and even criminalize doctors who perform the procedure, which is legal across the United States. Republican governors from three other states – Mississippi, Kentucky and Ohio – signed this year restrictive measures regarding legal abortion, one of the most serious advances in the movement against the legal interruption of pregnancy .

In the United States, the constitutional norm is governed by the decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade 1973, which established that abortion is legal until a fetus can survive alone outside the uterus, which usually occurs up to the age of one year. at twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.

Lawmakers and governors reportedly attempted to force the legal abortion to be discussed again in the Supreme Court, and possibly revised, as there are now two new magistrates, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by Donald Trump after the President promised that he would seek to revoke Roe v. Wade. "By taking this step, we respect the tradition, the constitutional tradition, to plead in good faith to alter and reverse the established legal precedent," said Mike DeWine, Ohio Governor, signing the law that restricts the right to abort in his condition, on April 11 last. "It's exactly what we do and it's the US Supreme Court that will have to decide in the end."

The so-called "heartbeat" laws prohibit abortion after detection of a heartbeat in the fetus, which can occur as early as six weeks after embryo formation, when a ultrasound can detect a heartbeat. it will become a heart.

That is, these recent state laws reduce the period provided for by the Constitution to terminate a pregnancy in more than four months.

Physicians measure the onset of pregnancy from the date a woman last menstruates, which usually occurs two weeks before fertilization. (Menstruation is used to define a time because it is impossible to know exactly when an egg has been fertilized). These new laws then essentially prohibit abortion when an embryo takes four weeks of development.

This is a time when most women can not even know they are pregnant because their menstruation started just two weeks ago.

In Georgia, there are some exceptions to the period planned to terminate a pregnancy, in case of rape or incest. Many laws recognize the legal right to abort when the life or health of a woman is in danger.

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an embryo is considered a fetus only eight weeks after fertilization, about ten weeks after the beginning of pregnancy.

When the pregnancy takes six weeks, the tissue that will eventually become a heart begins to develop and you can detect an apparent pulse faster than that of the pregnant woman.

Several medical experts, including those who oppose these new abortion restrictions, claim that in medical terms, it is wrong to describe this pulse as a heartbeat. They indicate that this is rather due to the vibration of "cardiac activity of an embryo" in the fetal pole, a tubular structure that will later become a heart.

At six weeks of gestation, the embryo has not developed brain, spinal cord or organs allowing it to stay alive outside of the woman's womb.

Some medical experts warned that Georgian law would harm women whose pregnancy was unsustainable and who had not been identified in the first six weeks. For example, in cases of ectopic or ectopic pregnancy, the fertilized egg begins to grow in an embryo outside the uterus and can never become a fetus capable of surviving. It is possible that after six weeks it has not yet been detected that the pregnancy is ectopic and, if it continues, it can cause serious bleeding in women.

Some reproductive health experts claim that these laws would not meet medical standards for early termination of ectopic pregnancy, so that a woman's life is not threatened. These health professionals worry that a doctor will be forced to pursue an unviable pregnancy until the woman's health is seriously compromised.

Pam Belluck writes on health and science. She is one of seven members of the Times team who received the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for her international coverage of the Ebola outbreak.

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