The following is from an editorial in The New York Times:
Anti-abortion groups have been trying to reimpose restrictions on abortion rights for 40 years, but the Legislature and governor of North Dakota have taken this attack on women's reproductive health and freedom to a shocking new low by passing a bill that they must know is unconstitutional by any reading of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision and others since.
Full abortion bans are allowable only after fetal viability, which the medical community generally considers to be around 24 weeks into pregnancy. But North Dakota joins a growing list of states trying to set that limit earlier.
North Dakota's Republican governor, Jack Dalrymple, signed extreme laws that went even further, centering on a brazenly unconstitutional ban on nearly all abortions once a fetal heartbeat is "detectable."
That could be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, when some women do not even know they are pregnant.
Bad ideas spread fast in this realm, and these kinds of actions show the rising influence of a formerly fringe element of the anti-abortion movement that is dissatisfied with its side's considerable progress in incrementally curbing abortions.
It is anxious to speed a case to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.
The campaign goes beyond abortion to the continuing Republican drive in Texas and other states to close down Planned Parenthood clinics that provide critical services like birth control counseling and cancer screenings.
The clear message is the need for a stepped-up effort to hold state officials electorally accountable for policies that harm women in states where right-wing Republicans control the machinery of government
