Take a look:
“Would that woman who decided to have an abortion — which would be considered an illegal abortion — be charged with murder?”
— Josh Shapiro (@JoshShapiroPA) September 27, 2022
“Yes.”
Doug Mastriano will charge women with murder for receiving life-saving healthcare.
Listen for yourself: pic.twitter.com/rB4JLWB6gR
There's some context for that quote from NBC:
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, said in 2019 that women should be charged with murder if they violated his proposed abortion ban.
In an interview with Pennsylvania radio station WITF, Mastriano was pressed about a bill he sponsored that would generally bar abortions when a fetal heartbeat could first be detected, usually around six weeks. Mastriano’s remarks in that interview were previously unreported.
And The NYTimes has a little more context:
As a state senator in October 2019, he co-sponsored a bill to ban abortion after the detection of electrical cardiac activity in the fetus, usually around six weeks.
Except it's not a heartbeat because there isn't a heart yet at 6 weeks. From AP:
Dr. Michael Cackovic has treated his share of pregnant women. So when Republican lawmakers across the U.S. began passing bans on abortion at what they term “the first detectable fetal heartbeat,” he was exasperated.
That’s because at the point where advanced technology can detect that first flutter, as early as six weeks, the embryo isn’t yet a fetus and it doesn’t have a heart. An embryo is termed a fetus beginning in the 11th week of pregnancy, medical experts say.
“You cannot hear this ‘flutter,’ it is only seen on ultrasound,” said Cackovic, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, where some 5,300 babies are born each year.
But why let science get in the way of some good demagogic discourse?
Back to St Sen (and now GOP cand. for PA Gov) Doug Mastriano. Here's more from Rollingstone:
Later in the interview, Mastriano added that abortion “absolutely is” murder, and doctors who performed the procedure as deemed illegal under his bill would also risk murder charges.
So no exceptions for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother and both mother and doctor risk murder charges of an abortion is performed.
Let's look at but one hypothetical. A woman and her doctor discover that she is having an ectopic pregnancy. In an ectopic pregnancy the fetus always dies. If she is lucky, the woman survives.
The treatment is an abortion, either chemical or surgical. Without it, the woman's life is at serious risk.
Wouldn't matter in Doug Mastriano's Pennsylvania. Abortion is murder. No exceptions.
It's not pro-life. It's forced-birth. And it is chillingly cruel.
