Tulsa’s ABC News affiliate reports:
The Oklahoma House gave final legislative approval on Tuesday to a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
With little discussion and no debate, the Republican-controlled House voted 70-14 to send the bill to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has previously said he’d sign any anti-abortion bill that comes to his desk.
The Oklahoma bill, which passed the Senate last year, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, said GOP state Rep. Jim Olsen, of Roland, who sponsored the bill. Under the bill, a person convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.
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Stitt, who contracted COVID in July 2020, announced a statewide day of fasting and prayer against COVID in December 2020.
On his inauguration day in January 2019, he declared that the primary mission of his administration would be to “bring people to Jesus.”
In April 2021, he signed into law a bill that legalizes running over protesters. Which is what Jesus would want.
Oklahoma state House approves bill to make performing an abortion a felony
The Oklahoma House gave final legislative approval on Tuesday to a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
With little discussion and no debate, the Republican-controlled House voted 70-14 to send the bill to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has previously said he’d sign any anti-abortion bill that comes to his desk.
The bill is one of several anti-abortion measures still alive in Oklahoma’s Legislature this year, part of a trend of GOP-led states passing aggressive anti-abortion legislation as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court is considering ratcheting back abortion rights that have been in place for nearly 50 years.
The Oklahoma bill, which passed the Senate last year, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, said GOP state Rep. Jim Olsen, of Roland, who sponsored the bill. Under the bill, a person convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.
“The penalties are for the doctor, not for the woman,” Olsen said.
Similar anti-abortion bills approved by the Oklahoma Legislature in recent years have been stopped by the courts as unconstitutional.
The bill’s passage came on the same day as more than 100 people attended a “Bans Off Oklahoma” rally outside the Capitol in support of abortion rights.
“These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes. “These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access.”
Wales said Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic in Oklahoma has seen an 800% increase in the number of women from Texas after that state passed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the U.S. in decades.
The Texas law that took effect last year bans abortion once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions in cases of rape or incest.
Also Tuesday, the Oklahoma House adopted a resolution to recognize lives lost due to abortion and urge citizens to fly flags at half-staff on Jan. 22, the day the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.
This morning I was listening to a podcast doing an interview with an abortion provider from Texas. She was talking of serval patients she needed to get out of Texas immediately because their lives were in danger. In one case the fetus had died and was killing the woman but legally she couldn’t abort the fetus under Texas law. In another case that was non-life threatening but also tragic a woman had been raped about two months prior and just realized she was pregnant with the rapist issue. She wanted it out. She begged the doctor but by Texas law the doctor could only get her out of the state. Some states have even blocked that avenue by making leaving the state for abortion illegal. In these cases there was no exemption to these laws for the life of the woman. Listening to this doctor talk about the real life situations and the things that clearly made it about controlling women and not about pro-life and how even attempt to prevent pregnancy was being made illegal. The more I learn about these laws the scarier the situation becomes. And to be clear these heartbeat bills are based on a total fiction. There is no heart beat at 6 weeks because there is no heart at that stage of development. There is a clump of cells that will turn into a heart later in development, it is called a something pole and it has a small electrical charge. But it is not a heart and it is not beating.
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