Thenew year is just beginning but Nebraska lawmakers are already hard at work onbehalf of the unborn. Starting off the 2020 legislative session, a bill hasbeen introduced that would ban dismemberment abortions in the state.

Nebraska’s state legislature reconvened for the year on Wednesday, and Legislative Bill 814 (LB814) was immediately introduced by State Senator Suzanne Geist (R-Lincoln). Co-sponsored by 20 other state senators, the bill reads:

Dismemberment abortion means an abortion in which, with the purpose of causing the death of an unborn child, a person purposely dismembers the body of a living unborn child and extracts him or her one piece at a time from the uterus through use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors, or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body to cut or rip it off.

Thisform of abortion, widely known as dilation and evacuation, is commonly used forsecond trimester abortions. If this bill were to be signed into law, theprocedure would be prohibited excluding cases where the life of the mother wasput at risk by continuing the pregnancy.

State Sen. Geist explained her support for the ban, stating:

I have introduced a bill this morning that will end the practice of a brutal and unthinkable abortion method here in Nebraska… This procedure has no place in modern medicine and is a horrible practice in our society… Regardless of our individual opinions on the issue of abortion, I think we can all agree that no living human being should be torn apart limb by limb.

PlannedParenthood quickly criticized the bill. Andi Curry Grubb, Nebraska executivedirector of Planned Parenthood North Central States, asserted that the goal ofthe legislation is to “eliminate access to abortion as part of a largeranti-abortion strategy to ban abortion method-by-method.”

“Planned Parenthood opposes medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion, like this one, that interferes with a physician’s ability to provide care to their patients and could cause patients harm,” Grubb added in her statement.

Whatever the outcome of this bill, such an early start out of the gate is a sure sign that legislation regarding abortion will be a priority on the legislative agenda this year in Nebraska.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0