California lawmakers aim to ease abortion rules

[garbon]

http://news.yahoo.com/california-lawmakers-aim-ease-abortion-rules-states-tighten-110509641.html

A proposal to allow nurses and midwives to perform some abortions is advancing in California's Democratic legislature, a move supporters hope will influence the national debate on abortion even as other states are tightening the rules.

If the measure is enacted, the nation's most populous state would allow nurse-practitioners, nurse-midwives and physician assistants to perform a procedure known as aspiration, which uses suction to dislodge an embryo from the uterine wall during the first few weeks of pregnancy.

Four other states - Oregon, Montana, Vermont and New Hampshire - allow non-physicians to perform these early abortions, but California would be the first to codify the practice in law.

The move comes as a handful of states, primarily in the country's south and midsection, have passed or enacted laws restricting abortion in recent weeks. Some of the measures appeared designed to stand as challenges to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal.

"What happens in California has a pretty significant impact across the country," said Democratic state Assemblywoman Toni Atkins of San Diego, author of the abortion bill. "We have that on business issues, on other issues and we think it's true on reproductive rights as well."

More broadly, the abortion bill is just one of dozens of left-leaning proposals gushing forth from newly emboldened California Democrats, who in 2012 won supermajority control of both houses of the state legislature.

[See link for rest of article]

[Viking]

Will they push for 58th trimester abortions like Texas loves?

[Neil]

If they can demonstrate that it's safe, then more power to them.