Two weeks in the past on January 12th, 2023, Senator Erika Geiss (D-Taylor) and your complete Senate Democratic Caucus launched Senate Invoice 2. SB 2 is Michigan’s first healthcare invoice for the brand new 2023 session and goals to repeal the state’s 1931 Michigan regulation banning abortions. Instantly, after being launched, SB 2 was referred to the Senate Committee on Well being Coverage the place it awaits a listening to.
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This isn’t the primary time a invoice like this has been proposed. Final session, Sen. Geiss launched the precise similar invoice, and Governor Whitmer issued a press launch calling “on the legislature to ship Senator Erika Geiss’ invoice that repeals our nearly-century-old ban on abortion to my desk.” Nevertheless, the invoice by no means made it out of committee and consequently died because the session ended.
Abortion rights was one of many greatest points dealing with voters within the November 2022 election as they had been instantly on the poll. The poll proposal 3 of 2022, the “Reproductive Freedom for All” petition, was an modification to Michigan’s structure to ensure each particular person has a elementary proper to reproductive freedom.
Voters handed Proposal 3 on November eighth, 2022, with 2,480,000 “sure” votes (57%) and 1,897,417 “no” votes (43%). The regulation took impact on December 23rd, 2022.
As a result of Proposal 3’s passage, SB 2 might be considered as a symbolic transfer ahead for pro-choice well being leaders and a deliverance of marketing campaign guarantees. Nevertheless, Senator Geiss desires to ensure Michigan’s legal guidelines are aligned with its structure and that the 1931 regulation doesn’t come again.
“We nonetheless must repeal the regulation. Within the occasion that one thing occurs to reverse [Michigan’s constitutional law], it doesn’t return into impact,” Geiss informed State of Reform. “It doesn’t turn into a zombie regulation, which is what the 1931 legal guidelines round abortion and girls’s productive well being [are] in Michigan.”
Beneath Proposal 3, the state can’t prosecute or take antagonistic motion in opposition to anybody who had an abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth. Moreover, the state can’t prosecute or take antagonistic motion in opposition to anybody who aided or assisted a pregnant particular person of their actions for an abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth.
Moreover, Proposal 3 makes certain that each particular person has the proper to reproductive freedom and pregnancy-related choices, which embody: prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion, miscarriage administration, and infertility care.
Lastly, beneath Proposal 3, Michigan can nonetheless regulate abortions however solely after the fetus is viable. The fetus is viable when there’s a vital probability it will possibly survive outdoors the uterus with out the applying of extraordinary medical measures.
Nevertheless, if the pregnant particular person wanted an abortion to guard their life, bodily well being, or psychological well being, the state can’t prohibit that abortion. This judgment of fetus viability and sufferers’ well being relies on the judgment of the attending healthcare skilled and the info of the case.
