With little notice and stunning quickness, anti-abortion legislators in Ohio stand one signature away from enacting the nation’s most stringent abortion law in the hopes of sparking a nationwide reversal of the legal right of women to terminate their pregnancies.

With a day left in their annual session, lawmakers Wednesday delivered to Gov. John Kasich a revived “heartbeat bill,” a ban on abortions from the moment a fetus’ heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as five or six weeks from conception. They left no exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, but abortions would be permitted to save the life of a pregnant woman.

“No person shall knowingly and purposefully perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman,” the bill reads, “with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of the unborn human individual the pregnant woman is carrying and whose fetal heartbeat has been detected.”

The legislation has already drawn promises of legal challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union, even before Kasich decides whether to cast a veto.

The Ohio Senate passed the abortion-ban amendment to an unrelated bill concerning child-abuse reporting on Tuesday afternoon, then passed the bill itself and sent it to the Ohio House, which voted 56-39 on Tuesday night to send the bill to Kasich for his signature.

Within hours, a Midwestern state that had already placed a number of restrictions on abortions opened the door to a new round of legal challenges on an issue likely to be key under President-elect Donald Trump, who will be nominating at least one U.S. Supreme Court justice early in his new administration.

Kasich, who unsuccessfully ran for the GOP presidential nomination this year, has generally favored moderate restrictions on abortion. “I am pro-life with the exceptions of rape, incest and the life of the mother,” he said on CNN in February.


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