Anti-abortion forces and Republican legislators who pander to them have repeatedly proposed stricter and harsher laws in state legislatures in recent years. Their purpose is always to make it increasingly difficult for women to get abortions and for physicians to provide them. The bill presently promoted by state Rep. Matthew Hill, R-Jonesborough, in the House reflects more insidious tactics to hamper the legal abortions that are mainly sought by women in desperate straits.
Rep. Hill’s bill, to be sure, was more extreme earlier this week than it is now, but that’s really just a question of degree. Following rising controversy, a House panel has stripped two highly controversial provisions.
One would have targeted physicians by requiring them to be publicly listed online as doctors in Tennessee who perform abortions. The other would have required state health officials to publicly provide detailed information about women who receive abortions — including their age, race and the county in which they reside, plus information about the “gestational” age of the fetus and personal information about a woman’s educational level and past pregnancies and abortions.
The first of these provisions would have exposed doctors to the potential violence of anti-abortion extremists, who in several instances around the country have stalked and killed doctors who have performed abortions, and have wounded or terrorized others. Rep. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, a physician, further argued that it would have identified and endangered physicians and obstetricians who might have to use procedures for miscarriages that could wrongly be classified as abortions.
Similarly, the high degree of personal information about women having abortions that would have been made public could have been easily used in many rural counties to identify and harass individual women.