Women’s rights are being rolled back in America – Georgia wasn’t even the beginning

Six states now have a variation of the ‘foetal heartbeat bill’ passed by Brian Kemp this week

Abortion has been a controversial topic in the US for a long time, but in the last year it’s become particularly charged. The 2016 election of Donald Trump emboldened hardline conservatives and evangelicals in the Republican Party, and the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court made a lot of reproductive rights advocates nervous.

Although Trump started off his presidential campaign seemingly unsure about where he stood on the abortion issue, and floundered more than once (at one point he said that women who had abortions should be sent to prison, before backing down when even anti-choicers disagreed), by 2016 he was promising that he would build a “pro-life coalition”. He also said, on becoming president, that he would nominate Supreme Court justices who would help overturn Roe v Wade, the historical court case that legalised abortion in America in 1973.

Since then, federal changes haven’t happened – but plenty of states have started to roll back women’s rights. This week, I wrote my column about the latest piece of legislation signed into existence in the state of Georgia by controversial representative Brian Kemp. The so-called fetal heartbeat bill makes abortions after six weeks illegal, and means that women who do terminate their pregnancies after that time could face life in prison.