LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (LifeSiteNews) — Arkansas legislators rejected an attempt to water down the state’s protections for preborn babies conceived in rape or incest.
An Arkansas House committee voted down a proposal from pro-abortion Democrat Ashley Hudson that would amend state law to let women kill their preborn babies in some circumstances.
Current Arkansas law prohibits abortions except when allegedly “necessary” to save the life of a mother. However, direct abortion is never actually necessary to save a mother’s life, as medical experts have affirmed.
State Representative Ashley Hudson sought to amend state law to include a broader exception for “health” and for rape and incest, as reported by the left-wing Arkansas Times, which smeared the state’s life-protecting law as “punishing.”
The “health” exception does not require a physical emergency but rather can be invoked for broad “mental health” reasons, such as the possibility that continuing a pregnancy may result in “depression.”
Pro-lifers stress that the circumstances of one’s conception do not affect his or her inherent human dignity or their worthiness to be protected from abortion.
Arkansas has reported very few abortions since the state’s strong protections went into effect soon after the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently signed legislation to further strengthen the state’s protections for preborn babies, taking aim at dangerous chemical abortion drugs that have flooded the country since President Joe Biden loosened regulations on their distribution.
Newly signed legislation “makes tricking someone into taking an abortion-inducing drug a felony of criminal abortion,” according to KARK.com.
While the effect of pro-life laws on reducing abortion remains a source for debate, recent research has suggested more babies are being born due to the laws.
As LifeSiteNews recently reported:
Abortion bans allowed to take effect after Roe v. Wade’s 2022 reversal increased anticipated birth rates by 2.8 percent in the affected states, according to a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
“We use difference-in-differences research designs to estimate the effects of abortion bans on births at the county level, leveraging data on changes in driving distance and appointment availability at the nearest facility where abortion remains legal,” explains the paper. “We find that bans alone increase births, but their total impact depends on geographic barriers to access.”
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions, and efforts to water down strong laws have failed recently, including in South Dakota.
“I just don’t think there is an appetite for any pro-abortion or pro-women’s rights bills, unfortunately,” House Minority Leader Erin Healy, a Democrat, complained in February. “I think that’s really unfortunate, because we do know that the language needs to be cleaned up, but the reality is that kind of bill would not pass in this body.”
