Arizona Bill: Women are Pregnant Before Conception

A new bill up for vote in the state of Arizona would ban abortions for some expectant mothers, but that’s only the start of what lawmakers have in store. If the legislation passes, the state will consider a child to exist even before conception.

Under Arizona’s H.B. 2036, the state would recognize the start of the unborn child’s life to be the first day of its mother’s last menstrual period. The legislation is being proposed so that lawmakers can outlaw abortions on fetuses past the age of 20-weeks, but the verbiage its authors use to construct a time cycle for the baby would mean that the start of the child's life could very well occur up to two weeks before the mother and father even ponder procreating.

On page eight of the proposed amendment to H.B. 2036, lawmakers lay out the “gestational age” of the child to be “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” and from there, outlaws abortion “if the probable gestational age of [the] unborn child has been determined to be at least twenty weeks.”

The architects of the amendment say that prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks — except in cases of medical emergency — is necessary for the safety of both mother and child. By designating a life to begin weeks before even possible, however, some critics are condemning Arizona lawmakers for looking for a way to involve itself in abortion matters before it can even become an issue.

“Certainly, they are trying move the gestational cutoff from what had been over the last two years a 20-week gestational cutoff to an 18-week gestational cutoff,” Guttmacher Institute’s State Issues Manager Elizabeth Nash tells Raw Story. “At the same time, they are trying to say, ‘Oh, this is a 20-week abortion ban.’ And they get away with that with the definition of gestational age that’s in the bill.”

“Considering that it’s anti-choice nuts we’re talking about, it’s safe to assume that they’d simply prefer a situation where all women of reproductive age are considered to be pregnant, on the grounds that they could be two weeks from now,” RH Reality Check’s Amanda Marcotte adds in a recently-penned editorial. “Better safe than sorry, especially if that mentality means you get to exert maximum control over the bodies of women of reproductive age.”

In extending her support for the legislation, however, sponsor Nancy Barto, a Republican senator representing the Phoenix, Arizona area says that fetuses are able to feel pain after the 20-week mark. Also favoring the proposal, Senator Steve Smith (R-Maricopa) adds that lawmakers also need to consider “the 50 million-plus children who have been killed” since the US Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v Wade.

"I would like to listen to the 50 million-plus children that have been aborted and killed since Roe v. Wade,'' the senator says."I would like to listen to what they think of this bill.''

Mother Jones adds in their own reporting, however, that while the law could be explained as an effort to deter complications that come from late-term abortions, opening up the window for the gestational age to begin before conception can hurt the parents in the long run. Essentially the act would outlaw abortion after 18 weeks, not 20 as the legislation claims, which could keep some concerned parents from making a decision about pregnancy before some medical procedures that gauge the health of the child are able to be determined. While some tests can be conducted soon after conception to catch potential life-threatening conditions and other impairments, outlawing abortions after the eighteenth week could keep parents from opting for abortion after other tests can be carried out (before the 20-week mark).

H.B. 2036 passed in the Arizona Senator by 20-to-10 and will soon go before the state’s House. To Raw Story, Elizabeth Nash says she believes the bill has a “very good chances of passage.”

It was those great American evangelical poets, the Insane Clown Posse, who asked us once to contemplate the following existential question: "Fucking magnets, how do they work?" But in 2012, after decades of eschewing comprehensive sex education, and lambasting everything from intrauterine devices and birth control pills to emergency contraception, perhaps it's time to admit that the most existential question of our time for religious conservatives to answer relates to women's mysterious reproductive tracts. So, erm, how do they work?

Sadly, religious instruction isn't much help: between telling women that an aspirin between the knees or a phonebook on a man's lap will prevent pregnancy, it's perhaps unsurprising that strict adherents to a religion in which a primary article of faith is that a woman was impregnated without the benefit of vaginal penetration or male ejaculate have a few problems fully articulating how modern women can get (or keep from getting) pregnant without a little confusion … or at least elision.

And so it is that we American women find ourselves being told by legislators in Arizona – those benighted do-gooders behind the anti-Latino "show us your papers" law and the anti-Obama "show us your circumcision" – that, in fact, pregnancy will no longer begin at conception. Instead, we're told, we'll soon be legally considered pregnant in the state of Arizona as of the date of our last period, which, as that silly godless "science" tells us, is usually about two weeks before we ovulate. It is true that some medical professionals use a pregnant woman's last period to estimate a gestational age in the absence of other data – like the actual date of conception which is, when one is not the Virgin Mary, actually not beyond a woman's capacity to know or recall or a doctor's capacity to determine. But a legal mandate forcing them to even when other diagnostic tools are more available or appropriate is simply a way to reduce their scientific and professional discretion for the purpose of limiting abortions in ways unimagined by the standards of Roe v Wade and in a manner that is not based on the way women's supposedly unknowable reproductive tracts work.

Of course, some religious conservatives believe that ovulation is a vast leftwing conspiracy anyway: despite the fact that birth control pills prevent ovulation by regulating the hormones that normally trigger it, some on the religious right have declared the pill an abortifacient, claiming that women taking the pill nonetheless ovulate, inadvertently fertilise their eggs and discard their precious offspring when the demon pill flushes the baby from their magical reproductive system. I mean, it's all so weird up in there, with those internal genitals from which life eventually springs forth, who can really be expected to understand it but God? (A god who, we should note again, allegedly impregnated a woman without any first-hand contact with those parts anyway.)

Ovulation debates aside, the Arizona law is really just an extension of the religious right's understanding of women as pre-pregnant vessels for the continuation of the species, regardless of our lives, health or actual desires. It isn't like the US ranks 39th in the world in maternal mortality, among the last in the developed world. It isn't like three in 10 women in the US will have an abortion in their lives. And it isn't like the majority of women who seek abortion were using birth control when they became pregnant, even though the religious right has fought for years to restrict women's access to – and information about – said methods of birth control.

And, goodness knows, it isn't as though the justifications for a law establishing the legal start of a pregnancy as weeks before conception in order to justify a ban on all abortions based on scientific criteria – gestational age and foetal pain – have any firm grounding in that godless science they so decry when women use methods of birth control they find unseemly. That would just be illogical.