Republican elected officials in the state of Louisiana, in the United States, introduced a bill on Wednesday to classify abortion as homicide, according to revelations from the Washington Post.
This project would allow prosecutors to charge patients who resort to abortion. The text aims to give constitutional rights to the fetus “from the moment of fertilization”. Women who choose to abort would then be considered criminally responsible for the death of the fetus, and would therefore risk prison.
The text must be presented to the vote of the two parliamentary assemblies of Louisiana by May 12. The governor of the state, although flat with the Democratic Party, is a staunch opponent of abortion. In 2019, he passed a law prohibiting women from having an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
According to several experts interviewed by the Washington Post, this new law could also jeopardize in-vitro fertilization and emergency contraception.
This bill in Louisiana was discussed only a few days after the revelations of the newspaper Politico, on the ambition of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States to annul the judgment Roe v. Wade who protects the right to abortion at the federal level. Revelations that led to large demonstrations to defend the right to abortion in Washington. Louisiana also has a “trigger” law that would make abortion illegal upon the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
In total, some twenty states out of the fifty could take the decision to abolish the right to abortion if the Supreme Court votes to overturn this judgment, in particular the states in the south and center of the United States, and this right could be hampered or seriously restricted in several others.