The Pregnant Person’s Freedom Act is also called Senate Bill 669. However, the issues go beyond using the strange word “person” instead of pregnant women.
The bill, sponsored by Dem Senator William Smith, will be put forward on March 15.
“The bill also puts forward a revision to the fetal murder statute that would prevent the investigation of infant deaths not related to abortion,” lawyer Olivia Summers from the American Center for Law wrote in her analysis.
The law prevents women and doctors from being prosecuted for “failure to act” in connection to a “perinatal death.”
“So a baby born alive could then be abandoned and allowed to starve or die,” Summers said, “and nothing could be done to investigate or punish people who participated in that cruel murder.”
In her opinion, the language in the law is not clear, so it could be interpreted as a bill that would “stop investigations into the murder of infants at least seven days AFTER they were born, and might extend to infants who are up to four weeks old!”
“Perinatal” is not defined inside the Maryland Code, Summers stated. As defined in a law enacted in 2020, “perinatal care” means prenatal, delivery, labor and neonatal and postpartum care.
Likewise, Portland Oregon was the first to allow employees of the city to take paid time off after getting an abortion. As a result of this decision, the city’s bereavement policy was updated.
Among the benefits to employees of the city is paid leave after pregnancy loss, like a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion.
“Termination” in this example was likely meant to mean abortions for a specific cause, like a fatal genetic deficiency, or some type of trauma that the fetus would not be able to survive.
But it is not difficult to see how such a law could be misused.
The Oregonian says that City Council members started looking at bereavement policy last year after workers complained that they did not feel represented or able to take a leave with the old policy.