Lawyer Chloe Akers' mission: to tell doctors there are no exceptions to Tennessee's new law banning abortion, and they could be prosecuted even if they're just trying to save women's lives.
Instead, it offers doctors an “affirmative defense.” The difference is linguistically subtle but extraordinarily meaningful in criminal law, Akers says. The law makes performing all abortions illegal. And instead of the state having to prove that the procedure was not medically necessary, the law shifts the burden to the doctor to convince a court that it was.Then she opened up Instagram, where she sometimes explains criminal law to a handful of followers.
Zite is a complex family planning physician, and until recently provided abortion care for pregnancies that threatened the life of the mother and for those where it was clear the fetus would not survive. The latter are no longer allowed in Tennessee.These are often desired pregnancies, with parents who have decorated nurseries and decided on names. It’s devastating every time, she said.
She signed up to be the medical director of Akers’ nonprofit. They hosted a panel of doctors and asked them: What are you afraid of? When she first began her tour, she thought of it as a pragmatic, apolitical effort to explain the law without the fervor of the abortion wars. She’d leave the debate to others.
As a criminal defense lawyer for 15 years — many of them as a public defender — she’s well acquainted with the mercilessness of America’s criminal justice system. Brewer has said — and has written in published essays — that the law should be interpreted as only applying to elective abortions, when the sole reason for termination is that the mother doesn’t want a baby.
“You still end up in the same place at the end of the day,” he said of the line between an exemption and a defense. “But you just make sure the due diligence was done and that the law was treated with the seriousness that it deserves.” And these Ohio laws governed only later-term abortions, which account for a tiny fraction of terminations, she said. The post-Roe laws like the one in Tennessee will govern virtually all pregnancies, so the number of times a termination could be questioned in court will skyrocket.
“We’re being told there’s this very fine tightrope where you can follow the law. And if you fall one way, you’re committing a felony and if you fall the other way and you wait too long, then someone can sue you for malpractice. It feels pretty much impossible,” she said. “What am I supposed to do?” Tennessee already ranks toward the top of the list of states with abysmal maternal mortality rates, and Zahedi worries this will make matters worse.
The patient, a woman of strong faith, agonized over the choice, and Zahedi lived through that grief and despair alongside her. The patient didn’t want to risk leaving her two living children motherless and decided to terminate.
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