Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, the West Virginia Legislature is jumping on the anti-abortion ban bandwagon.
Mimicking Mississippi’s law — which awaits judgment from the U.S. Supreme Court — HB 4004 bans abortion after 15 weeks gestational age. This ban only makes exceptions for life-threatening medical emergencies and for “severe fetal abnormalities” where life cannot be sustained outside the womb. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.
Because of the way gestational age is calculated (from the beginning of the patient’s last menstrual cycle), a patient’s pregnancy can be backdated by almost four weeks, giving them an 11-week window to obtain an abortion — and that’s only if they realize they are pregnant almost right away. According to the American Pregnancy Association, most people don’t realize they are pregnant until around four to seven weeks — leaving eight weeks or less to get the care they need.
All of this is on top of West Virginia’s pre-existing laws, which require the state’s lone clinic in Charleston to provide certain materials to the patient at least 24 hours in advance of the procedure. This usually means the patient will have to come back the next day.
Obstacles to access — traveling long distances, getting time off work, affording care, transportation and overnight accommodation — just make an already difficult decision unnecessarily harder.
HB 4004 passed the Health and Human Resources Committee — which consists of five women and 20 men — and goes next to the Judiciary Committee, which consists of three women and 22 men.
When voting in favor of the bill, HHR committee vice chair Dean Jeffries (R-Kanawha) talked about being able to see the features of his twin grandchildren on ultrasound at 15 weeks. Good for him — we’re sure that was a special moment for him and his family.
But it’s easy for Mr. Jeffries to make a decision that will never affect him. As the one-time sperm donor, his body will never have to undergo the changes of pregnancy: He will not watch his body balloon and swell and ache in ways it never has before. He will not have to battle morning sickness (which is not confined to the morning) or the hormones that change his mood and personality in ways he doesn’t recognize. Or any of the other myriad ways pregnancy alters the body — and none of them pleasant if you don’t want to be pregnant.
And he will not have to suffer the social ramifications. He will not have to watch career opportunities disappear before his very eyes because an employer doesn’t want to hire or promote someone they think will be on leave, or will just leave, in a matter of months. He will not carry the weight of society’s stigma around pregnancy out of wedlock — or the economic and social backlash of single motherhood that simultaneously paints them as welfare queens for needing help and as neglectful mothers for working hard to support themselves and their child.
Bills like HB 4004 are not pro-life — they are pro-birth.
If Jeffries and his compatriots in the Legislature want to help West Virginia’s children, they will dedicate less time to abortion bans and more time to addressing the problems in our state that endanger child welfare, like the opioid crisis and pervasive poverty. They would put more effort into recruiting and supporting foster families and kinship placements for the 7,000 children already born who are still in the foster care system.
But anti-abortion bills are never really about children — and West Virginia’s Legislature is proving that.
