In recent years, many states have challenged the Supreme Court decision known as Roe vs. Wade, the ruling that had allowed abortions to be a legally approved medical procedure with certain parameters. During the last few years many states, in particular those in the South, have actively and aggressively attempted to erode the rights given to women in that famous decision. This paper will discuss recent legislation introduced and passed in the Oklahoma state legislature, laws that would significantly curtail the rights for women to choose to terminate a pregnancy. In this paper, several such bills will be described and HB 1595 will be examined and followed through its legislative path which ultimately ended in the defeat of the bill by the state’s Supreme Court.
In 2010, the Oklahoma State Senate passed five antiabortion bills, three of which were ultimately sent to the governor to sign into law. The first bill, HB 2526, would disallow “wrongful life” lawsuits which involve parents who are seeking monetary damages because their child’s was born with a birth defect caused by the mother’s inability to receive an abortion (Riley, 2010.) This bill was especially pertinent in Oklahoma since in recent years, the number of obstetricians/gynecologists who provide abortion services as dwindled to near zero because of pro-life legislation. Another bill, HB 2780, was to require doctors to perform vaginal ultrasounds within one hour of providing an abortion while simultaneously showing and explaining to the female patient the images visible on the ultrasound. HB 3075 was to require any medical facility providing abortions to display a sign indicating that it is illegal to force someone to have an abortion. Two additional bills, including 1595, would require a woman seeking an abortion to respond to 38 questions, including the reasons for seeking an abortion, and would also prevent state insurance plans from providing coverage for elective abortions (Riley, 2010.) These laws have all been thoroughly criticized by civil liberties and civil rights groups on the basis that they are in violation of several constitutional principles ranging from the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech to the fourth amendment guarantee of due process to equal protection under the law.
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"Oklahoma Bill HB 1595: The Abortion Conflict".
In February, 2009, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed HB 1595 which creates the statistical reporting for abortion act and a state run website to post this information as a matter of public record. HB 1595 was considered to be one of the most stringent abortion laws in the United States. Pro-choice activists believed that the purpose of this legislation was to harass and intimidate women (Lester, 2010.) According to its wording, HB 1595 prevents women from getting an abortion on the basis of desiring a child that is a different gender than the developing fetus. In addition, and probably the most objectionable part of the law, the bill mandated that doctors ask patients approximately 40 personal questions, the majority of which see details about the woman’s relationships and her reasons for choosing to have an abortion. The questionnaire was to be either completed by the patient or verbally responded to during her medical exam with the doctor. Although the questionnaire does not include the name of the patient, much of the information gathered would make it easy for women who live in rural areas to be identified by their responses, which were to be made part of a public public record. Because the specific facts of the responses involve age of the woman, marital status, years of education, number of previous pregnancies and their outcomes, it appeared to many of its opponents that the purpose of answering this burdensome survey was clear: to reduce or eliminate the number of women seeking abortions (Lester, 2010.)
The language of the bill was thought to reinforce the true agenda: the person seeking the abortion was not referred to on the questionnaire as a patient or a woman, but rather as “the mother.” Although the question that sought to identify the reasons for having an abortion included almost 40 options, the list of possibilities did not include the option to check off a reason indicating that the woman simply does not want to have a child at that point or even ever. The idea that a female does not use to become a mother was completely absent from the language of the bill, thereby suggesting that this was not a legitimate reason to decide against completing a pregnancy. The very vocal opponents of this legislation felt that it was just a thinly disguised effort to cause guilt or shame on a woman who is exercising her right to a legal medical procedure (Lester, 2010.)
Ultimately, HB 1595, as well as several other abortion restrictions, was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court. It was believed by the Court that such restrictions violated constitutional principles that had been decided in past Supreme Court decisions such as Roe versus Wade. HB 1595 was clearly an effort by the state government to limit women’s reproductive freedoms. Fortunately for the men and women of Oklahoma who believe that women and their doctors must make decisions relating to health and reproduction, HB 1595 was not upheld. Bill such as this one have been introduced in great numbers throughout the United States for the last few years, and many of them have passed in state legislatures, only to be stopped by decisions made by the upper courts.
In Oklahoma, there appears to be an aggressive effort to simply make abortions burdensome, shameful, and stigmatizing if they are available at all. The people who oppose the right to have an abortion have been successful at using intimidation and bullying tactics to reduce the numbers of physicians who provide this legal medical procedure. In the most extreme cases, they have murdered these doctors, certainly having an impact on medical providers’ decisions about whether or not to provide this procedure. In Oklahoma, undoubtedly there will be more efforts to limit women’s health options, but in the case of HB 1595, as well as several other bills, these attempts have failed.
