This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp has signed legislation to ban abortion once cardiac activity can be detected – which can be as early as six weeks, before many women even realize they are pregnant.

The signing caps weeks of tension and protests at the state capitol in Atlanta, and marks the beginning of what could be a lengthy and costly legal battle over the law’s constitutionality.

Kemp said he was signing the bill “to ensure that all Georgians have the opportunity to live, grow, learn and prosper in our great state”.

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The legal showdown is exactly what supporters of the legislation are looking for. Anti-abortion activists and ultra-conservative lawmakers across the country, energized by the new conservative majority on the US supreme court that includes the Donald Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, are pushing ever stricter abortion bans.

It also represents a further threat to the court’s landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which legalized abortion nationwide until a fetus is developed enough to live outside a woman’s uterus.

Quick guide What is Roe v Wade? Show Hide Norma McCorvey, pictured, was the real name of the woman known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark 1973 US supreme court case Roe v Wade, which established the right of American women to have abortions. McCorvey became the plaintiff in 1970 after she met with two lawyers looking for a test case to challenge the abortion ban in Texas, where it was a crime unless a woman's life was at risk. Similar statutes were in place in nearly every other state at the time. At the time, McCorvey was pregnant, unmarried, unemployed and unable to obtain an abortion legally or otherwise. The case went to the supreme court, which handed down the watershed ruling that a woman's right to make her own medical decisions, including the choice to have an abortion, is protected under the 14th amendment. McCorvey never had an abortion. Her case, which proceeded largely without her involvement, took too long to resolve, and she gave birth to a child that she placed for adoption. Several years after the ruling, she publicly revealed her identity and became involved in the pro-abortion rights movement. But after a conversion to Christianity, she became an anti-abortion rights activist. Before she died in 2017, McCorvey had said it was her wish to see Roe v Wade overturned in her lifetime. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

The bill is one of a growing number of similar pieces of legislation being pushed at state level, in what anti-abortion campaigners call “heartbeat bills” even though that is a medical inaccuracy as well as a politically inflammatory term in the reproductive rights debate.

Sean Young, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, said the ACLU would challenge Georgia’s new abortion restriction in court.

“Under 50 years of supreme court precedent, this abortion ban is clearly unconstitutional,” Young said in a recent interview. “Every federal court that has heard a challenge to a similar ban has ruled that it’s unconstitutional.”

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Under current law, women in Georgia can seek an abortion during the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy. If it is not blocked in court, the new ban would take effect on 1 January next year.

The legislation makes exceptions in the case of rape and incest if the woman files a police report first, and in order to save the life of the mother. It also would allow for abortions when a fetus is determined not to be viable because of serious medical issues.

The bill also deals with alimony, child support and even income tax deductions for fetuses, declaring that “the full value of a child begins at the point when a detectable human heartbeat exists”.

In fact, at six weeks, an embryo has not yet formed heart chambers, and is not considered a fetus until nine weeks into pregnancy.

The Republican state representative Ed Setzler, the bill’s author, said in an interview after the bill passed the state House that it was a “commonsense” measure that seeks to “balance the difficult circumstances women find themselves in with the basic right to life of a child”.

But the Democratic senator Jen Jordan disagreed that the legislation was balanced. “There’s nothing balanced about it, it’s an all-out abortion ban,” she said.

Jordan said she was especially worried the new law would push obstetricians away from practicing in Georgia, worsening healthcare outcomes for women in a state that already has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country.

“It’s about the unintended consequences,” Jordan said. “They’re making policy choices that are going to end up causing women to die, and they’re preventable deaths.”

In the first few months of 2019, six-week abortion bans have been signed into law in four states: Mississippi, Kentucky, Ohio and now Georgia.

Tennessee, Missouri, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Louisiana and West Virginia are considering similar proposals.

A bill in Alabama would outlaw almost all abortions at any stage of pregnancy.