I have linked the filing below. The language pretty clealy prohinits state regulation pre-viability without extraordinary medical measures absent a compelling government interest. After viability it allows state regulation except in the case of the physical / mental health of the mother.
One could argue this is more restrictive than Roe.
Or, to be more precise, it's not more restrictive than Doe v. Bolton and Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania.
Doe and Casey (1) did not subject abortion regulations to strict scrutiny, which that language would and (2) made clear that "mental health" valves had no objective content and were an effective proxy for mere subjective desire.
Also, that amendment defines viability as turning on (a) the good-faith judgment of a treating physician and (b) the child's ability to survive without "extraordinary medical measures," neither of which, as I recall without having looked it up, featured in the "viability" jurisprudence growing out of Casey.
So that measure would be materially more permissive than the regime under Roe and its progeny.
simple trimester approcach of Roe. If the medicine detemrines babies are viable before the end of the first trimester then the "dates" move up.
As for the strict scrutiny you are right that was not in those cases.
My main point is this is not aboriton on demand until the point of birth. Is it possible there is a medical provider somewhere who could be convinced a pregnant woman was so stressed out about the prospect of being a mother they would abort in the 8th month? I suppose anything is possible.
As I have said elsewhere I think this idea shows a great disrespect for women in gneral and health care providers.
Casey ditched the trimester regimen.
This is the problem with trying to gauge public perception of these issues. People use phrases and don't know what they mean. We use "Roe" as a proxy for "Roe and it's progeny," even though the contours of Roe's rule weren't maintained by its progeny.
And as for the any-reason-up-to-birth, it's precisely that. That's what Doe and Casey permitted, because their jurisprudence didn't allow for practical enforcement of the restrictions they purported to permit. Gonzales v. Carhart allowed a restriction in the form of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, but that only applies to one form of procedure.
Growing up going to Catholic school and going to Christian Medical Association stuff in med school you get the sense that all doctors performing abortions are ghouls, can't be trusted, and we need very strict laws to control them.
But I had an attending in residency whose husband was a widower. He was because his wife developed post partum psychosis and killed herself and all the kids after she delivered while he was deploy. She'd had psych issues with prior pregnancies, so it was a known risk (and a lot of dropped balls happened medically to not admit her). But there are some severe psychiatric conditions that are set off or exacerbated by pregnancy that can absolutely be threats to life.
I had a Catholic family who delivered a kid with trisomy 18. The life expectancy is a few months, but some do live past a year. The woman's pregnancy presented an elevated risk of morbidity/mortality, but not so much that a bad maternal outcome would be likely. She elected to deliver, but I could see making the decision to terminate as reasonable.
Another condition you can see is kids with single ventricle physiology. Basically the kid has one functional ventricle. They need at minimum three surgeries in childhood, and most require transplant in young adulthood. Most elect to pursue treatment, but it's an acceptable decision to defer treatment and provide compassionate care to the kid. Some pursue termination because they see that as sparing the suffering of having the kid go into cardiac arrest. That won't fly under laws that restrict medical decisionmaking.
There are a lot of subtle/nuanced medical decisionmaking that is hard to legislate. If you broaden laws enough for people to do what they think is reasonable, a lot of stuff you object to will sneak through.
If you have life of the mother only thresholds you actually get some dead mom, because some things are hypothetical risks to the life of the mother that might come to pass if a problem goes on too long. Heck pregnancy itself presents an elevated but small increased risk of death over the alternative.
Personally, my experience is that even very pro abortion OB's have some moral limits to what they'll do.
comes from.
Even the most "ghoulish" of ob/gyn who support a woman's right to choose are also doctors and human beings. Is that to say there is not one anywhere who would abort an 8 month fetus? I dont speak in absolutes so I wont say no. Am I confident that that other proffessionals who would be needed to pull it off would be difficult if not impossible to find? Yes I am.
The truly ghoulish person is likely in a back alley doing it illegally anyway.
For the mental health of the mother to do this. Are there evil people in the world yes but they don’t need an exception to commit evil.
won't be able to find people to help them, it happens. So we should account for the possibility and do what we can to protect against it. Please note that I don't think that that means extremely restrictive laws. This is a difficult subject and one for which my opinion is not set in stone. I will acknowledge that I would prefer to err on the side of protecting life. I also acknowledge that it is not as simple a scenario as, for example, the death penalty. In modern prisons in the US the chance of a dangerous offender escaping and wreaking additional havoc upon the populace is low or zero. So putting an offender to death serves only as vengeance, and is not justifiable. The factors here are much more complex, but we would do well as a people to wrestle with them and come to some solution that satisfies no one. That's how we will know if we achieved a decent compromise. We may discover years after we each are in the ground how wrong we were at the time, but all we can do is decide based upon what we know now.
If you made it this far, congratulations for powering through my rambling, and have a good evening.
who thinks the mother's mental health is threatened by the pregnancy.
Why would they box themselves in when they wrote the language?
First, even accepting your view as correct, the proposal is not abortion up to the point of birth. The State is allowed to regulated (prohibit abortion) and there is an exception for the mothers physical and mental health. I am quite confident the state would have the right to enforce regulations about those exceptions.
Second, you appear to hold medical professionals and pregnant women in very low regard if you believe they will terminate a pregnancy up to the point of birth because they are stressed out.