by Hilary White
BATON ROUGE, April 26, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Senate of Louisiana has passed a ban on abortion in a vote that rejected including exceptions for pregnancies due to rape or incest.
In a 17-20 vote, the Senate defeated an amendment proposal to allow the exceptions and then passed the bill 30-7. If passed into law by the state House and not vetoed by the governor, the proposed law would outlaw all abortion except that which saves the life of the mother.
The law would impose up to 10 years in prison and fines of $100,000 for doctors found guilty of performing abortions. The bill contains a clause specifying that it does not apply to women seeking or undergoing abortion. The bill also precludes outlawing abortifacient drugs such as RU-486 or hormonal contraceptives or Morning After pills.
The bill also rejects the current fashion in medical ethics that claims a woman is not pregnant from fertilization, but only after the embryo has implanted in the uterine wall. It defines pregnancy as “having an unborn living human being within (the mother’s) body throughout the entire embryonic and fetal stages of the unborn child from fertilization to full gestation and childbirth.”
It defines an “unborn human being” as the child from the first instant of penetration of the ovum by the sperm.
Sen. Ben Nevers, the Democrat sponsor of the bill said he opposed adding exceptions for rape because abortion after a rape solves nothing for the mother but only compounds the trauma. “Lord knows I would never want to hurt a mother, in any way. Lord knows I would never want to hurt a victim of rape or incest,” but, he said, “a crime committed by a rapist should not result in the death of an unborn child.”
Sen. Joel Chaisson, who tried to add the rape and incest exceptions, argued that the House would be unlikely to pass an abortion ban without them.
The bill contains a provision that says the ban will only come into effect when the US Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Nevers said he feels the likelihood of such a move is high after the appointment to the Court of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
Read the text of the bill:
https://legis.state.la.us/billdata/streamdocument.asp?did=385269
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/apr/06042006.html