AUGUSTA, Maine (LifeSiteNews) – The Maine Legislature has given final approval to legislation allowing abortions anytime an abortionist deems it “medically necessary” during a pregnancy, setting up Maine to become one of the most abortion-lax states in the country.
LD 1619 allows for abortion up to birth “when it is necessary in the professional judgment” of a licensed physician legally permitted to commit an abortion, replacing the current cutoff point of fetal viability, after which abortions are only permitted if determined to be necessary to save a mother’s life.
The bill also removes criminal penalties for committing an elective late-term abortion without the necessary license and changes reporting standards to eliminate identifying information about a woman who obtains an abortion and only require details about the date, location, and method of the act, as well as the age of the baby when he or she is killed.
Fox News reported that the bill cleared its last hurdle Thursday with a 20-11 Senate vote, and now awaits a signature from Democrat Gov. Janet Mills. Once signed, the new law would add Maine to the six states (plus the District of Columbia) that allow abortion at effectively any point in pregnancy: Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont.
Republican state Sen. Eric Brakey expressed concern that allowing post-viability abortions solely on an abortionist’s determination of necessity could be “used as a pretext for something much bigger” than merely permitting abortions in extreme situations.
The pretense of “medical necessity” has long been one of abortion industry lobbyists’ most potent tools to circumventing pro-life laws, with the specter of women dying in childbirth due to being denied abortions contributing to the defeat of several pro-life ballot initiatives last year, despite being unfounded, as a matter of both medicine and law.
Numerous medical professionals, including former abortionists, have attested that, while many circumstances may necessitate delivering a baby before he or she can survive outside the womb or indirectly end the baby’s life, such treatments are not abortion as they do not entail direct, intentional violence on the child for the purpose of ending his or her life. In fact, direct induced abortion is typically the worst thing that can be done for women in an emergency, as it takes longer than administering actual care.
Further, every state with pro-life laws currently on the books explicitly makes exceptions for medical treatment to save the life of a mother, regardless of whether that treatment is classified as abortion. Additionally, the vast majority of abortions have never been sought for medical reasons, but for social, career, or financial considerations.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions, with available data so far indicating those states could effectively wipe out an estimated 200,000 abortions a year, and discrediting abortion defenders’ long-running predictions that abortion bans would only force women to continue aborting through more dangerous and illicit means.
Meanwhile, abortion allies pursue a variety of tactics to preserve abortion “access,” such as easing distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, attempting to enshrine “rights” to the practice in state constitutions rather than the U.S. Constitution, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, and making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors.
President Joe Biden has called on Congress to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law, which would not only restore but expand the Roe status quo by making it illegal for states to pass virtually any pro-life laws.