Jerry Brown, Democratic governor of California, has approved AB 154, a law that will allow midwives, nurses, and other non-physician professionals to perform early-stage abortion.
"Timely access to reproductive health services is critical to women's health," said California State Assembly member Toni Atkins. She was the one who authored the bill.
Republican group leader Brian Jones, however, thinks that the law is more harmful to women. "It's truly disheartening and disingenuous that Governor Brown and legislative Democrats created a law to lower the standard of care for the women under the guise of creating access," He expressed his disappointment saying that the Governor's action in ratifying the law is "dangerous for women," he said in an interview with Reuters.
Supporters, however, are hoping that this new law will influence other states and incline the ongoing debates in favor of extending abortion procedures to non-medical professionals.
The AB 154 will let California-based nurses, midwives, nurse-practitioners and physician assistants to carry out abortion in pregnancies that are still at its early stages. They will be using vacuum aspiration, a common procedure which can be done within the first trimester of pregnancy, to easily remove the embryo in the uterus.
California, which has the highest population among the states, is not the only one that allows this abortion procedure to be done by non-physicians. Codifying the abortion practice for nurses and midwives into a law is the first however. Four others, New Hampshire, Montana, Oregon and Vermont also let them to carry out abortion during the early stages.
The quality of women's reproductive health has been also monitored by pro and anti-abortion supporters. There are a significant number of states that had passed several laws that control abortion practices. These states are located around the south and middle parts of the country.
The abortion-limiting laws seem to go against "Roe v. Wade" the abortion law authorized by the U.S Supreme Court in 1973. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and Gallup organization prove that majority of Americans support this decision.
According to the Pew survey early this year, 63 percent of the participants think that the abortion law should be retained.
