Arizona legislators look to criminalize abortion

Rep. Walter Blackman (R – Dist. 6) introduced House Bill 2650, which would criminalize abortion, in this year’s legislative session; now, residents of Arizona are wondering if a similar bill is in the works for the next session.

This year’s session of the Arizona State Legislature produced almost 500 new laws, but there are even more bills that legislators worked on that did not pass through the legislature or become law. Legislation like House Bill 2650, also known as the Abolition of Abortion in Arizona Act, could be reworked and reintroduced in the next legislative session.

The bill classified abortion as first-degree murder and punishable by death or life in prison. Rep. Blackman, the prime sponsor of the bill, campaigned on his pro-life values. His continuous pledge to end abortion in Arizona has led him to introduce and support several anti-abortion laws during his time in the legislature.

“I believe that life starts at conception. To protect our future, I have proposed legislation to protect life in the womb,” Rep. Blackman said in a Tweet earlier this year. When contacted, he refused to comment on whether he is currently working on a new abortion-related bill, but his online presence is almost entirely devoted to the issue.

Arizona State University Professor Dr. Pamela Stewart teaches classes related to women’s studies and how women have lived in American. While she doesn’t focus on reproductive rights specifically, Stewart has spent her career familiarizing herself with women’s lives in a historical context and in relation to laws passed to control them. Upon reading the bill, Stewart characterized it as “patently unconstitutional.”

Arizona State University Junior Jordyn Walhof believes the bill if re-introduced into the legislature, would set a dangerous precedent for future legislation.

“If we're going to decide that a fetus is a human the instant that it is conceived - as would be needed to justify a first-degree murder charge - then all other policies would have to follow that. Absentee parents would have to start paying child support as soon as the child is conceived. Tax deductions for dependents start as soon as the child is conceived. Going on a roller coaster while pregnant is child endangerment. Invitro fertilization is kidnapping. These sound incoherent, and they'd certainly never make it past a Congressional committee,” Walhof said.

Walhof said she believes the bill to be an attack on women. Comprehensive sex ed, family planning services, accessible birth control, contraception healthcare are a few alternatives proposed to decrease the number of abortions in the U.S. Walhof also compared Rep. Blackman’s bill to the Texas abortion restrictions that were recently passed.

“If it's not about preventing the abortion and it's actually about saving the baby's life, then there are also a lot of things that people can do. Realistically, it's not about that. The Texas law also made that really clear when there was a provision added to incentivize reporting women who got abortions,” Walhof said.