Among more than a dozen abortion and so-called reproductive health bills California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Tuesday, one piece of legislation has pro-life advocates sick to their stomachs.
Assembly bill 2223 would prohibit coroners from holding an inquest after fetal death “related to or following known or suspected self-induced or criminal abortion.” The bill would further clarify under the Reproductive Privacy Act that pregnancy loss — through miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, or perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero — would not be criminalized.
Newsom signed the bill, vowing to “fight like hell” for those who want abortions as several states nationwide deal with the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision last summer to overturn Roe v. Wade, bringing abortion laws back to the states.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), who authored the legislation, told The Los Angeles Times that lawmakers created the bill to “ensure and enshrine that no person can be criminally prosecuted for something that happens in utero, which has happened in California.”
Wicks argues since the early aughts, approximately 1,300 pregnant “people” have been criminally prosecuted for having miscarriages, stillbirths, or for “self-managing” abortions.
Yet California lawmakers who oppose the legislation have warned such laws could put unborn children in grave danger by prohibiting such investigations.
State Sen. Melissa Melendez (R-Lake Elsinore), who has pressed Wicks since introducing it in the state legislature, called the bill a “grotesque callousness toward the unborn.”
“With Newsom’s signing of AB 2223 if you attempt to abort your baby but it’s born alive, you can now let it die or kill it and no one can investigate the death or hold the woman/person who helped her criminally liable,” Melendez said in a tweet. “ This is grotesque callousness toward the unborn.”
Susan Swift, vice president of legal affairs for the Right to Life League, told The Epoch Times what California legislators have done with abortion in the state is “horrific.”
In June, the Right to Life League wrote an open letter to California lawmakers about the bill, saying it was poorly drafted and could de-regulate the entire abortion industry.
“In its attempt to protect women from prosecution for abortion, AB 2223’s overbroad language creates a host of unforeseen legal ramifications,” the letter reads. “The bill potentially de-regulates abortion and overrides existing medical protections for women by creating a class of cooperating individuals unaccountable to state licensing agencies or regulations.”
The organization said AB 2223 goes much further than shielding pregnant women from prosecution.
“Nobody’s going to want to risk the lawsuit of investigating [a death],” Swift told The Epoch Times. “And it’s going to cover up all the data of all of the babies that survive abortions.”
The California Globe reported that The California Family Council, a biblically-based pro-life organization, explained their opposition to the bill.
The group wrote that lawmakers not only want to codify the “killing of unborn children throughout all nine months of pregnancy but to decriminalize killing newborns days or even weeks after birth.”
Earlier this year, during a hearing for the legislation, LifeNews.com tweeted a video showing hundreds of California residents showing up to voice their concerns about the bill.
However, Wicks claimed, according to The California Globe, that it was “not a bill about infanticide” and women should “not be prosecuted for a pregnancy loss.”
Newsom signed the bill just before the November midterm elections where residents will vote on Proposition 1, a proposed amendment that would not allow the state to “deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”
