On May 7, Governor Kemp signed House Bill 481, the harshest set of restrictions on abortion in the history of the country. But the General Assembly may not have intended it that way.
The law does two things. First, it disallows physicians from providing abortion care to pregnant women whose last period was more than six weeks prior, unless the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, in which case the victim is given 20 weeks to escape her captor and terminate her pregnancy. There are exceptions for “futile” pregnancies, where the child will not survive after birth, and for medical emergencies, where the woman will die or suffer irreversible physical (but not emotional or mental) impairment if the government forces her to give birth.
