But don’t worry, it’s the GOP that’s “anti-science.”
Via Weekly Standard:
The House Subcommittee on the Constitution held a mark-up hearing this week on a bill that would ban abortions during the final four months of pregnancy with exceptions for when the life or physical health of the mother is at risk. To the “millions of women who value their personal autonomy,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, this bill looks “like just another battle in the perpetual Republican war on women.”
During the hearing, Nadler called the bill “facially unconstitutional” because he said it would ban abortions prior to viability, the point at which a baby can survive long-term outside the womb, and the point at which the Supreme Court has ruled abortion bans may be enacted.
But medical studies show that Nadler is factually wrong: Some babies born 20 weeks after conception–the point at which the bill would ban most abortions–can survive long-term outside the womb. “In June 2009, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a Swedish series of over 300,000 infants,” Dr. Colleen Malloy testified before Congress in 2012. “Survival to one year of life of live born infants at 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24 weeks postfertilization age was 10%, 53%, 67%, 82%, and 85%, respectively.”
Nadler’s factual error was partly to blame on his misreading the bill under consideration in the House. Nadler said that the federal bill banned abortions at the same point in pregnancy as did an Arizona law recently struck down by the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for banning abortions prior to viability.