Recently a bill was signed into effect by the Alabama governor known as the Human Life Protection Act, or House Bill 314. This bill was to ban all abortions in Alabama besides any deemed necessary to prevent the mother from extremely dangerous medical circumstances. Click here for a legal analysis on the bill’s constitutionality when exclusively looking to the bill’s language itself and the applicable case precedent.

Aside from the explicit and conflicting relationship between HB314 and previous Supreme Court decisions on this constitutional issue, there are a few other concerning or interesting points presented in this House Bill. The choice in some of the language and topics stated in the bill are quite irrelevant to the bill’s purpose and unclear/exclusive in its application to all persons in the state of Alabama. The bill doesn’t seem to present the best case for itself in its basis for implementing the ban. It also leaves some room for ineffectiveness, which seems a bit counter-productive.

Looking first at what could be considered vagueness (also a trait considered unconstitutional) –

The bill states that doctors can be convicted of a felony for performing an abortion on women in the state of Alabama outside of the criteria it deems compliant. What is left open for question here is how this bill is supposed to be interpreted when a man becomes pregnant. This bill specifically says “women” and does not refer to “people.”

It is not often that a man becomes pregnant, but it is not completely unheard of. There are many transgender men in the United States who have had their gender legally reassigned on a birth certificate to state they are male. Even though they are legally male, they may have not had gender reassignment surgery or taken other transitional steps to shut down their reproductive systems and abilities to conceive/bear child. See “Can Men Get Pregnant?“

In United States law, both at federal and state level, the plain language of statutory law is to be looked to first. Until this particular bill is brought up in court in its prevalence over a present and justiciable situation, only the literal provisions of the bill could be enforced. There is no right of any Alabama state or local government to alter interpretation of the bill without judicial review. Until then, it appears that this bill does not apply to transgender men who are legally defined as male on their birth certificates and that doctors performing abortions on these individuals could not be convicted of a felony without judicial review of the bill’s language itself.

Looking next to the inconsistent language of the bill –

HB314’s word choice on abortions and performance of them focuses on its applicability to “unborn children” or “unborn life.” These are the words used in what it is seeking to prohibit: abortions of the unborn.

The bill first provides an outline of several medically-based reasons the state feels this ban is necessary. Examples include the point at which a fetal heartbeat is detectable as well as the development of the being in utero. After these reasons, the next one takes a turn to a different avenue of reasoning. It compares the death tolls of major genocides across the world to the number of “babies” that have been aborted since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade.

Not only is the use of genocide death tolls irrelevant and debate-ably inappropriate, the word choice shifted in a sneaky way to emphasize the bill’s authors’ moral convictions. It further invalidates a legal basis for its construction and leans on emotional basis instead. The bill was written only to apply to “unborn children” or “unborn life.” “Babies” are defined in Merriam-Webster as extremely young children, or infants. Young children and infants are considered beings that have already been born and not the “unborn” that the bill applies to

While the feelings here behind this blog post are definitely in opposition of the bill, it seems like there are other reasons for passing the bill that the authors could have included to give it a stronger basis. The stretch of comparing it to genocide and straying from the original word choice makes it shaky and discredits the reasoning. That coupled with the ineffectiveness of the bill’s language when considering pregnancies of transgender men, this bill put up its own roadblocks before even being signed into effect.

In a nutshell –

The authors of this bill are absolutely trippin.