Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is set to meet with abortion providers and women’s rights activists in Georgia Thursday following the passage of new “heartbeat” abortion legislation in the state.
The bill, signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) recently, bars doctors in the state from performing an abortion once a fetus’s heartbeat is detectable, typically around six weeks into a pregnancy.
{mosads}Most women do not know they are pregnant at that point.
The legislation is the latest flashpoint in the national debate about abortion rights and the fate of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that recognized a woman’s right to the procedure.
Gillibrand, who has put women’s rights front and center in her 2020 presidential campaign, has been vocal about the wave of restrictive abortion laws being passed in Republican-controlled state legislatures.
“The onslaught of abortion bans passing in states—as recently as in Alabama’s legislature last night—represents the greatest threat to reproductive freedom in our lifetimes,” she tweeted Wednesday ahead of her trip to Georgia. “We need to fight back, hard, on the frontlines.”
“Right now, the conversation about what women can do with our own bodies is being driven by too many male politicians. It should be led by the actual experts: women and doctors. So I’m going to hear from the people most directly affected by abortion bans like Georgia’s.”
“We’re facing an all-out assault on women’s constitutional rights, explicitly aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade. We need to loudly proclaim that reproductive rights are nonnegotiable, and join together to defend them at every level—in Washington, in the courts, and in the states.”