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The Mississippi House of Representatives passed House Bill 732 and Senate Bill 2116 that would prohibit abortions after a fetus’s heartbeat is detected which can be as early as six weeks.

According to the Guttmacher Institution, 43 states prohibit abortions, generally except when necessary to protect the woman’s life or health, after a specified point in pregnancy. Mississippi legislation has tried to pass other similar bills in the past that have a very strict time frame.

Under these abortion restrictions, any doctor performing an abortion after this time frame for reasons other than a medical emergency in which the mother’s life would be in danger would be at risk of losing their license according to the Congressional Research Service.

“It’s so restrictive in Mississippi that we don’t do a lot of this anyway,” Dr. Elaine Thompson, OBGYN in Southaven, MS, said. “Instead we would send people to Little Rock.”

There is only one abortion clinic in Mississippi located in Jackson.

Thompson said that the biggest issues for doctors with the passing of the heartbeat bill would be in cases of ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy occurs when the fetus is forming outside of the uterus.

“Ectopic pregnancies can have a heartbeat. With these pregnancies though the fetus isn’t viable and they can be very life-threatening for the mother very quickly. You don’t know anything is wrong until it is happening,” Thompson said.

For doctors with these cases, there is always the fear of being sued.

In Alabama, there is a court case currently in the appeals process. In the case of Kimberly A Stinnett v. Karla G. Kennedy, Kennedy administered a drug to Stinnett who had a history of ectopic pregnancy believing that she could be experiencing a second one. This drug can be used to end pregnancies.

Several weeks after the drug was administered, Stinnett suffered a miscarriage and is currently suing Kennedy for wrongful death. While the case is still in the appeals process, The courts have been debating the issue of viability in regards to the case.

According to caselaw.com, “Dr. Kennedy and Women’s Care thus contended that true “congruence” between the Homicide Act and the Wrongful Death Act required that Dr. Kennedy and Women’s Care be excepted from civil liability under the Wrongful Death Act for the death of an unviable fetus.”

“At six weeks the fetus looks like a gummy bear with a heartbeat,” Thompson said. “At 14 weeks the skull has begun to ossify.”

The courts hold viability to be around 22-24 weeks.

Previously, the state tried to pass a ban on abortions after 15 weeks, but the law was struck down by District Judge Carlton Reeves.

Even in the face of Reeve’s decision to strike down the ban that would prohibit abortions at 15 weeks, Mississippi legislation aims to produce a stricter bill. Barnett said that he would hate to not pass a bill solely on an assumption of what the courts will do.

Reeves stated in his decision regarding the fifteen-week ban that “Mississippi’s law violates Supreme Court precedent, and in doing so it disregards the 14th Amendment guarantee of autonomy for women desiring to control their own reproductive health.”

“The fifteen-week bill is still tied up in the courts, so it’s going through the appeals process right now, and we hope it will make it through to the Supreme Court,” Mississippi Rep. Shane Barnett said. “There are several states with more restrictive bills, and hopefully the more bills that are out there, the greater the likelihood that the Supreme Court will hear the case.”

Barnett was one of the co-authors of House Bill 732 which means he helped review the bill. The primary author of the bill was Chris Brown. He had the help of 23 other authors though only three of which were female.

On the other hand, many people have issues with the ban because it may prohibit women from having the option of getting an abortion before they even know they are pregnant.

“These bills would ban abortion – outlawing the procedure before most women even know they’re pregnant,” Felicia Brown-Williams, Mississippi State Director at Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates said in a prepared statement on the bans. “Individual rights and freedoms go to the heart of who we are as a country, including the right to access safe and legal abortion. Mississippians should be able to make their own most personal health care decisions without politicians controlling when, how or why.”