the story of succession and leadership. and jersey in a post the story for the client of dentist. and. the count of. 3. as you know. in georgia the governor is poised to sign one of the most restrictive antiabortion laws in the country missouri state senate passed and we go from banning containing no exceptions for victims of rape incest or even to crimes right on the heels of alabama's even stricter legislation in 20199 u.s. states passed laws that would ban abortion in the beginning stages of pregnancy as early as 6 weeks before many women even know they're pregnant. the state of georgia recognize the benefits of providing all legal recognition i'm born child alabama went the furthest and banned the procedure from the moment of conception. just

a few years ago the bills were considered politically toxic. and extreme proposal by a fringe element of the anti-abortion movement over 60000000 innocent babies have illegally made it up there. this is a crime against humanity in a city gets. this but this year they swept through republican controlled state houses and were signed into law. the laws are being challenged in court and none are yet in a fax and on judge has blocked ohio's and so called beat all heartbeat law this bill is not about pro life. this bill is about control. for the 1st time this state will make georgia women criminals. women else for seeking basic reproductive care ok.

these laws are part of a strategy to challenge the way the supreme court decision that made abortion legal across the country almost 50 years ago do you think a majority of people in georgia wanted this bill to pass the heart no absolutely not was this law written to challenge oh yes of course it was faultlines travels to alabama and georgia 2 of the states on the front lines of this battle. or so for next saturday the 70 7 45 in the morning to ask what's at stake when access to abortion is under threat and how far can these laws go. because your. people i am i mean this bill would create a new pathway to criminalize black and brown women which you've already seen the disappoint facts in the criminal justice system these are the latest attempts not merely to overturn roe v wade and the right to choose abortion they are about

stablish hang in the law the fact that women have a 2nd class. alabama has become ground 0 for the country's it illogical battle over abortion. and the fight over what should prevail the rights of women or the unborn. babies already have a part. in maine the state passed the most restrictive abortion law in the country banning it in nearly all cases including rape and incest. it's the latest chapter in the anti-abortion movement's decades long campaign to end abortion i just found this on the ferro it out there one of the fight dollars. they have this out yet they'll try to like tell you that's what your papers. for years they've chipped

away at abortion access by pushing for laws that make operating clinics difficult if not impossible. and they've succeeded. 50 clinics closed in the american south between 20112017. under the new legislation doctors who perform abortions could face up to 99 years in prison. who is pain is the main abortion provider here and has been a doctor for 50 years. has your clinic ever experienced any kind of threats or as anything ever happened yeah we've had you know the arson far it was total destruction of $97.00 and their way had the all weather shot out once and then we had to get out it drove his car into the way or. the new laws could have far reaching implications not only for abortion clinics but for anyone who

becomes pregnant. they're part of a fetal personhood movement which seeks to give fertilized eggs embryos and fetuses the same legal rights as people who are far. fewer. fatah's yasir. that will allow our own what we're trying to follow scientists are 1st for the city of roses savage to salt the seed as earlier you were you know or certainly. you know the 1973 supreme court ruling roe v wade said that states can't restrict a woman's right to an abortion until the fetus becomes viable and can survive outside the uterus according to the ruling that can start at 24 weeks but the supreme court sidestepped the question of personhood and refused to quote resolve the difficult question of when life begins and that's where eric johnston a lawyer who drafted alabama's bill saw an opening that of medical science can

prove that the unborn child is a person that gets the rights of the constitution and i think that higher purpose in our. wall and alabama is to approach it that way you know they didn't have the sonograms and the ultrasounds in the field for godfrey that we have now. it's women like nora a 20 year old student who would be directly impacted by this law. i'm getting an abortion. and i'm choosing to the surgical procedure. because. she's 5 weeks pregnant but as i have seen author sound like the size of. an eye brain as a heart beat like it's not anything that's actually living god these are they throw back. right. most people saying the stuff it's man and so they don't understand the responsibility and pressure that puts on women to say that

anything that's inside you is now like your responsibility and you have to give birth to it and might carry that for the rest of your life. and it's also saying a fetus isn't only equal to a woman but it's like more important than a woman's personhood because like i mean i don't get to choose today. what would it mean for you if you didn't have option to have an abortion right now and i probably dropped out of school and like probably moved back home in love with my mom and i feel like a nightmare situation yeah i don't know what i would do probably try some at home would be really dangerous. to go so we're going to school this is where the rest are safe. if these abortion bans go into effect it would mean going back to a time before bush and was legal nationwide. dr payne who's 80 remembers that time well because there were a lot of illegal abortions. a lot of

a lose their uterus lose their o. reproductive ability and that's the way it was bag. and that's what. well it won't ever go back to there because i'm not going to outlaw abortion. but opposed roe world is what johnston was imagining when he wrote alabama's bill in the summer of 20 teen as president trump was gearing up to nominate conservative judge brett kavanaugh to the supreme court. were you thinking this is our moment not necessarily i was thinking that the circumstances are about as favorable as they may ever be there are several factors that are brought us through that probably the biggest ones will be to new justices on the supreme court we think that they are likely to reverse roe if given the opportunity and that's right 2019 all of a sudden like a year or shed year for these kinds of laws in a row there were 2 competing concepts one was the privacy rights the individual

rights of the woman the other was the rights of the unborn child and the u.s. supreme court said well since the unborn child is not a person then the woman within her rights of privacy has a right to have an abortion. and that the unborn child is a person then that trumps the rights of the woman because she is the rights of 2 individuals. that it's a fiction. the fact is that as long as that life is inside of another human being there is no way to treat it as a matter of laws if it's separate without taking away the personhood of the pregnant woman what has been called the fetal personhood movement is an attempt by political activists to establish as a matter of law separate rights for fertilized eggs embryos and fetuses so that

police and prosecutors and legislators husbands and other outsiders can control the people who get pregnant women. if alabama provided fertile ground for shaping the country's most extreme anti-abortion law georgia has become the center of the resistance. in may. lawmakers here passed a so-called heartbeat bill effectively banning abortion and around 6 weeks. any bill that outlaw or restrict a woman's right to access abortion care is a bill that is calling for the policies of forced birthing for women. and we do not need your condescending bills that challenge our bodily autonomy one of the

most fervent opponents was state representative granita shannon as soon as this bill was introduced i immediately called it what it is which is the forced birthing bill for the women of georgia and i promised myself that if this bill hit the floor i would speak so long i would force the speaker of the house to physically remove me and other health professionals and let my users who are going to be mounted on their own herman know x. that they be now this way around sort of in the context of this she descended on the grounds that black women would be hit hardest by the ban wire is protected and i'm giving her my number bastion of literacy maternal mortality tracks women dying due to complications related to pregnancy up to a year after giving birth and if you look at countries that have outlawed abortion immediately you see a spike sometimes up to 50 percent of more women dying in maternal mortality and black women are already $3.00 to $4.00 times more likely to die than their white counterparts. and it is the reason why black and brown women have come out so fiercely against this bill. the bill's main sponsor was georgia representative and

sets where the issue before this house is the question of when should human life be protected by the law we're trying to give recognition to disenfranchise groups that had not gotten full and appropriate recognition in the past i think where the groups that's been ignored now for decades has been the unborn. the bill passed by a narrow margin and was signed into law by. the state's republican governor brian camp. he and other georgia officials are now being sued in an effort to stop the long. kemp's office declined repeated requests for an interview governor have governor you know whatever was the 1st lady so we did the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is sister song a social justice collective focused on reproductive health led by women of color.

a little bit. monica simpson is their executive director she's also a soul singer. the lawsuit argues that black low income and rural women would be disproportionately impacted by the abortion ban and points out that black women in particular face some of the highest pregnancy related deaths in the country. the legacy of forced reproduction under slavery still looms large. we're talking about being able to make decisions for ourselves make you citizens for our bodies. because what i refused to do is to go back to a day where our states are controlling our bodies that sounds like a very scary time to my ancestors lived through that allowed need to be here today and i'm not going back.

since black people arrived in this country we have effectively had white men telling us what to do with our bodies in slave time and we were forced bred to create more slaves we were raped by slave masters so this is par for the course and we see the same thing by a party that is majority white men again now trying to tell black and brown women especially what is best for their bodies. this is like you decide this is a double it was a digital divide people were delivering mail we will build it speak with us please . clarify that i have a right to see that right that's right abortion rates have been falling for more than a decade across racial groups and income levels. if you believe that you gave their lives to give it a. good woman of color and those living in poverty are more likely than their white

counterparts to have abortions that's because they're less likely to have access to quality contraception and health care. things are there when you come here and you hear people like him. saying that they'll take care of your baby and then however you want to do with. the anti-abortion movement has used these statistics to claim that women of color are being targeted for abortion it's not worth it to the top. oh. oh no. i have not seen any of these pro-life people at a black lab i have not seen them at the maternal health conference but we're talking about feeding the best outcomes for folks who are pregnant and i have not seen them talking about economic justice or environmental justice they're not talking about any of that they're talking about fetuses. to divide everything you need if you were just in. just listing it and if you only care about

a fetus but you don't care about the world at that fetus would have to live in or if you don't care about the life of the person that's carrying that fetus then you are not about life oh. say i'm going to do that here. for the woman the. people who do not understand or subscribe to this commitment to reproductive justice are trying anything they can to deny. yes the ability to have what we need it's not just as narrow as have a baby or don't have a baby. have an abortion at one point in their lives might be the very thing that helps them to grow their families later. look at you our news come in and want to do some big. this is absolutely a civil rights issue. but reproductive justice advocates so we talked to said they feel that black women and women of color are some of the most negatively impacted

by your bill they say that this is an example of white men telling black women what they can do with their bodies it's a false premise i. reject that sort of. that's your answer to them it's a false promise you know we as a legislature responding to a very diverse group it's amazing the people who they think they're speaking for that support or bill. these lawmakers say that they are protecting life so what is your response then whose life whose life are you concerned that you don't have to dehumanised the pregnant person in order to assign humanity to the cells that are growing inside for. if these fetal personhood laws are allowed to move forward there's concern it could open a pandora's box from not 3 weeks pregnant a pregnant woman would legally be considered to people and states would have more

power to charge pregnant women for behavior that otherwise wouldn't be considered criminal her. own fault. and it's your right and it's. own portion advocates worry that this bill could end up criminalizing women that have miscarriages or abortions is that a legitimate concern but there's 0 legal basis for the. are women going to be criminalized for trying to end pregnancies themselves. you know the woman is not criminalize it's got a certain exemption for her. he's a lawyer on the border there are a whole bunch of other laws in alabama there are murder statute there manslaughter statute their chemical in danger of a child statute their child abuse laws there's an innumerable practically a list of laws that could be used to arrest a pregnant woman all based on the theory separate rights for fetuses so excluding

a rest from a single statute the abortion statute really means nothing especially in a state where women are already being arrested hundreds of them in relationship to their pregnancy. from alabama suffered a miscarriage after being shot at how she's being charged with bad slaughter for the death of her unborn child since 1973 more than $1200.00 women have been arrested or detained in connection with their pregnancies according to data from the national advocates for pregnant women and pro publica sent to prison for half of these cases were in alabama women who have had a home birth with a midwife and women who have delayed having says arion surgery women who had stillbirths miscarriages or given birth to babies they couldn't guarantee would survive have been arrested for manslaughter and 1st degree murder and 2nd degree murder if you travel while pregnant it could be considered kidnapping none of these are hypotheticals these things are already happening.

here do you think. that if a state you get. kidero of it says who lives in alabama is one of these women. she suffered from severe epilepsy since she was a teen. as i go electricity store your brain is getting 100000. years ago she became pregnant and then miscarried she says her doctor told her that anti-seizure medications could raise the risks of birth defects. when katie became pregnant again she stopped taking her medication. instead she relied on marijuana to help regulate her seizures thinking it posed the least risk to her unborn son anyway whether he is looking for here you know you know after she gave birth and 2014 katie and her baby were both drug

tested. it was about a week after i and. i had. been home i remember one morning i got a phone call from playstation and asked me if i was home. and they come in immediately after that it's like barged into me it would put me in handcuffs. too big to take showed up with bullet proof vests like you know it was going on i walked in on me i came i said that in certain places in my own house you know my you know ya'll are taking my wife away after she just gave birth you know i. am telling you how do you know i'm sorry i love you but i can't i can't fight them you know how to die just to keep me. you know how long i was going to be in nearing exactly what they were going to charge me with. and. i was really scared that i wouldn't be able to see my family again. because they were

they were talking about put me in prison. but like 15 to 20 years 10 years of her. what exactly were you charged with. chemical in danger i'm an only child a law intended for people that were in my cooking meth around their children you know which of course is bad you know but she tried to do what she thought was. good for our son and what i'm going to get is going to stave us said if i had a seizure i give it a high percentage of both of us diane but it is higher for him to. get hurt. than me. in 2006 alabama passed its chemical endangerment of a child wrong. the architects of the law intended for to protect children from homes where drugs were being made. but prosecutors and judges effectively turned it

into a fetal personhood law. individual prosecutors thought i'm going to use that law as a mechanism for responding to pregnant women who use drugs. the state supreme court a ballot bama whose chief justice is deeply anti-abortion ruled that the law could apply to the unborn in the womb and once that law was upheld hundreds of women have since then been arrested based on the fact that they used any amount of any controlled substance and including ones that their physicians have legitimately appropriately prescribed to them. katie spent 8 days in jail her family says the case cost them more than $10000.00 other than her having epilepsy she had a healthy pregnancy she had never been arrested she had never been in trouble. i think that we're the lucky ones. because. we was able to get katie's case

dismissed with a lot of work and a lot of people on her side. what are you most concerned about in this political landscape i'm concerned that it's going to get worse nit picking and looking at the mother trying to see if she did something wrong. if someone has a stillbirth for them to start looking to see what the mother did wrong and i think that a lot of innocent women are gonna get arrested before things change. if the concept of fetal personhood takes hold what's at stake for women goes far beyond abortion. with 2 supreme court justices appointed by donald trump it's a new era. and the future of reproductive rights is now in the hands of the most conservative court in decades. the nomination and appointment of kavanagh's

deeply disturbing and not only because of the risk that roe v wade would be overturned and abortion might be criminalized but the much larger implications of all that which is that women will go to jail. trying to imagine for a way around what it would be like to be 40 i don't think i can. i don't think. i don't think we'll ever know. these are laws that are really about a much larger agenda and it is an example of massaging me that itself can justify incredible cruelty to the people who get pregnant. white supremacist violence is on the rise in america. he was about in this whole

underground network 8 full time speaks to the victims of recent attacks when he shot me i turned around and he would have killed my daughter and asks how an ideology of loathing has found its way into the mainstream can you trawled through line between the rhetoric of president trump and the conservative media in america to what happened here in el paso license to hate on al-jazeera was taken to. was that i was severely beaten up. in force they were saying don't think he intends to make sure that jews were no longer entitled to their basic rights or citizenship rights one 3rd villages were burnt down were funneled into what is now become complex where the marines are basically your friends exiled coming soon on al-jazeera.

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