New Bills in the N.J. Legislature Take Aim at Reproductive Rights

As Trenton and the state media remain wrapped up and involved in the multi-faceted, twisted and interrelated scandals that have collectively been called “Bridgegate,” anti-abortion radicals in our Legislature continue their very real war against the right of women to control their bodies.

Their latest assault is in the form of two identical, dare I saw “twin” bills introduced in both houses. Together they are misleadingly titled the “Full Disclosure Ultrasound Act.” The Assembly’s bill is A848, the Senate’s S231.

Regardless of the name, the bills are aimed at placing another menacing roadblock on a woman’s road to attaining a legal, safe abortion – a road that for many women is one intensely personal and difficult enough without the interference of the state. The bill would require a doctor, as part of the “informed consent process,” to offer an ultrasound that presented the image of the fetus in utero.

The bill’s intent is obvious, that being to utilize the power of the state to generate some hoped-for ‘guilt trip’ on the part of any woman seeking a legal abortion. Apparently some of these women would, upon seeing the fetus, call off the procedure and proceed with the pregnancy. Is the pregnancy the result of a rape? Of an incestuous relationship? It really doesn’t matter. It’s just another moment of victimization for any woman seeking the exercise her constitutional right to control her own body.

These kinds of bills attest to the absolute ruthless deception of those who are not otherwise courageous enough to introduce a bill to outlaw abortion in all cases completely – a clearly unconstitutional idea anyway that would, according to most polls, be rejected by the overwhelming majority of the people of this state. These bills are a clear attempt to chip away at the hard-won, painstakingly defended rights to bodily control and privacy in Roe v. Wade.

These bills are part of a new dual-strategy wave of legislation, mostly occurring in southern state legislatures. The first part of the strategy is to add a myriad of new requirements and steps in the medical abortion process, to complicate and delay it and provoke mental agony on the part of the patient. The second part is to create a set of difficult or impossible requirements for clinics to meet, in an effort to limit them or close them down entirely. After all, what good is the right to have an abortion if there aren’t any clinics within 300 miles?

The bills that constitute the so-called “Full Disclosure Ultrasound Act,” should be rightfully renamed, in the spirit of full disclosure, “An Act to Continue the Efforts to End The Reproductive Rights of Women.”