Twenty weeks from today it will be October 30th. Is that six months from now? June is the sixth month of the year. October is the tenth. October 30th is four months and eighteen days from now. So, if you were to get pregnant today, and Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) were to get his way, October 29th would be last day that you could get an abortion, even if you had been raped or the victim of incest.
Nevertheless, Rep. Franks defended the lack of rape and incest protections in his bill this way:
“But when you make that exception [allowing rape victims to get abortions], there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment.”
There are a lot of things wrong with that brief statement. I don’t understand his comment about reporting a rape within 48 hours, but if you don’t report it fast enough it doesn’t mean that you haven’t been raped. It doesn’t mean that the rapist might not confess or that evidence could still link them to the crime. And it should be obvious that incestuous relationships can go on for a long time before they result in a pregnancy and there is no 48 hour requirement for each sexual encounter. But it’s also not the sixth month of gestation. A complete ban on abortions after the 20th week means that it cuts off at four and a half months. He’s off by six weeks. And they are pretty significant weeks in fetal development.
Franks also characterized 30,000 annual rape pregnancies as a “very low” incidence level. That’s pretty obnoxious. His stupid bill will never become a law, and most rape victims aren’t going to wait until the 20th week to seek an abortion, but I wouldn’t waste my breath defending him.
