INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Hundreds of individuals arguing the abortion problem surrounded the Indiana Statehouse and crammed its corridors Monday as state lawmakers started consideration of a Republican proposal to ban almost all abortions within the state and Vice President Kamala Harris denounced the trouble throughout a gathering with Democratic legislators.

Harris stated throughout a visit to Indianapolis that the abortion ban proposal displays a well being care disaster within the nation. Regardless of the invoice’s abortion ban language, anti-abortion activists lined up earlier than a legislative committee to argue that the invoice wasn’t strict sufficient and lacked enforcement tooth.

Indiana is without doubt one of the first Republican-run state legislatures to debate tighter abortion legal guidelines following the U.S. Supreme Court docket choice final month overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court docket ruling is predicted to result in abortion bans in roughly half the states.

“Possibly some folks want to truly learn the way a lady’s physique works,” Harris stated Monday, eliciting murmurs and laughs from the Democratic legislators. “The parameters which can be being proposed imply that for the overwhelming majority of girls, by the point she realizes she is pregnant, she is going to successfully be prohibited from accessing reproductive well being care that may enable her to decide on what occurs to her physique.”

Confrontations erupted periodically between anti-abortion and abortion-rights demonstrators across the Indiana Statehouse. One individual carrying a message on cardboard — “Compelled Start Is Violence” — adopted a person, who carried a pretend purple fetus in a plastic bag over his shoulder, and tried to obscure his signal that learn “Save Our Infants.”

Some folks had virulent arguments encircled by different demonstrators

“You suppose it is best to dictate my life and my children’ lives. That’s what you’re saying,” Kait Schultz, who wore a darkish grey “Pregnant and Pissed” shirt, shouted to Christopher Monaghan.

“You don’t wish to have a dialog,” Monaghan replied as they spoke over one another. He held a vertical signal that learn “Infants Lives Matter.”

Elsewhere Monday, Lawmakers in West Virginia’s Republican majority hurried to advance laws that may criminalize abortion with few exceptions. A invoice launched Monday makes offering an abortion a felony carrying as much as 10 years in jail. It supplies exceptions solely in instances the place there’s an ectopic being pregnant, a “nonmedically viable fetus” or a medical emergency.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice abruptly added state abortion legislation to the state’s Legislature’s agenda for a particular session he known as for Monday to give attention to his revenue tax lower plan.

In his announcement, Justice requested legislators to “make clear and modernize” the state abortion legal guidelines within the wake of the Supreme Court docket ruling. Per week in the past, a Charleston decide blocked enforcement of the state’s 150-year-old abortion ban, saying the current legal guidelines enacted by the West Virginia Legislature “hopelessly battle with the legal abortion ban.”

In Tennessee, in the meantime, the lawyer basic’s workplace stated it’s nonetheless unknown when the state’s anti-abortion “set off ban” will go into impact, however some state lawmakers are elevating alarm that the ban has no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.

Tennessee has been limiting abortion as early as six weeks into being pregnant — when most girls don’t know they’re pregnant — ever because the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s abortion choice final month. Republican Gov. Invoice Lee refused final week to reply questions from reporters on he supported tweaking the set off legislation, notably sidestepping on whether or not he supported exempting youngsters who had been raped after which turned pregnant.

In Wyoming, a lawsuit filed Monday by a Casper girls’s well being clinic and others seeks to dam the state’s new abortion ban simply earlier than it’s scheduled to take impact. The lawsuit claims the brand new legislation violates the state structure with restrictions that may discourage probably lifesaving being pregnant healthcare in Wyoming, forcing pregnant girls to go to different states for vital procedures.

Indiana’s Republican Senate leaders proposed a invoice final week that may prohibit abortions from the time an egg is implanted in a lady’s uterus with restricted exceptions — in instances of rape, incest and to guard the lifetime of the mom. The proposal adopted the political firestorm over a 10-year-old rape sufferer who traveled to the state from neighboring Ohio to finish her being pregnant.

“She is a child,” Democratic Rep. Cherrish Pryor of Indianapolis, one of many lawmakers on the assembly with Harris, stated of the kid. “Why ought to we power infants to have infants?”

The case of the Ohio lady gained huge consideration when an Indianapolis physician stated the kid needed to go to Indiana as a result of Ohio banned abortions on the first detectable “fetal heartbeat” after the Supreme Court docket’s abortion choice.

The last word destiny of the Indiana abortion invoice within the Republican-dominated Legislature is unsure, as leaders of Indiana Proper to Life, the state’s most distinguished anti-abortion group, are decrying the Senate proposal as weak and missing enforcement provisions.

Republican Senate leaders stated the invoice wouldn’t add new legal penalties in opposition to docs concerned with abortions, however they’d face presumably having their medical licenses revoked for breaking the legislation.

Quite a few anti-abortion activists argued in opposition to together with the exceptions permitting abortions in instances of rape and incest.

“I don’t consider youngsters ought to be murdered primarily based on their circumstance of conception,” Emma Duell of Noblesville informed the Senate committee. “What occurred the evening they had been conceived, one thing they don’t have any management over mustn’t have an effect on whether or not they’re shielded from abortion violence or not.”

Republican Sen. Sue Glick, the abortion ban invoice’s sponsor, stated she anticipated amendments could be thought of tightening the exceptions earlier than the Senate’s anticipated vote on the proposal later this week.

Representatives of a number of doctor teams raised considerations in regards to the Indiana proposal presumably being questioned and prosecuted over their medical choices.

Ariel Ream of Indianapolis stated she was present process fertility therapies and apprehensive that the abortion ban might go away her well being threatened if she had been to have a miscarriage and face bleeding.

“When am I hemorrhaging sufficient to have the ability to get care?” Ream stated. “We don’t know should you go to the ER that physician’s going to be scared sufficient to place their license on the road for me.”

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Arleigh Rodgers is a corps member for the Related Press/Report for America Statehouse Information Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit nationwide service program that locations journalists in native newsrooms to report on undercovered points. Comply with Arleigh Rodgers on Twitter at https://twitter.com/arleighrodgers