Emily Wales, interim CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, speaks to abortion rights advocates outside the Oklahoma Capitol.Photo: Sean Murphy/AP/Shutterstock
Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill Tuesday that would ban abortions in almost all cases and make performing them a felony, making it themost restrictive anti-abortion legislation yet.
The bill passed in Oklahoma’s Senate last year before going to their House on Tuesday, where lawmakers voted 70 to 14 in favor of the ban. It will now go to Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, who previously promised to sign “every piece of pro-life legislation” sent his way.
Rep. Jim Olsen, a Republican who wrote the bill, said that their intention is that the bill would coincide with the Supreme Court’s decision on Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Oklahoma’s expectation, along with that ofmultiple other Republican-led states that have enacted restrictive abortion laws in the last year, is that thenewly-conservative Supreme Court will overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade casethat established the right to abortion with the Mississippi decision, and therefore make their legislation legal.
Oklahoma’s ban would take effect Aug. 26.
Oklahoma has seen an influx of people seeking abortions from Texas ever since the state banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy in September. Abortions in Texas have dropped 60% since their ban, according tothe Texas Health and Human Services Commission, but the Trust Women clinics in Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kansas said they’ve had an increase.
“What we saw very immediately after S.B. 8 is we doubled our volume,” Kailey Voellinger, clinic director at Trust Women Oklahoma City,told NBC News. “We went from seeing about 100 to 150 patients to almost 300 in a month.”
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The bill passed through Oklahoma’s House with no discussion.
“Nobody debated and nobody asked any questions,” Olsen said,according toThe New York Times. “I was actually kind of shocked.”
Planned Parenthood, whichruns two of the four remaining clinics offering abortionsin Oklahoma, said thatthey plan to fight the law.
source: people.com
