Men who don't use condoms could be guilty of 'aggravated assault' under new Georgia law
Bill would also create a 24-hour 'waiting period' for men who wish to buy porn or sex toys and ban vasectomy procedures
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Your support makes all the difference.A politician in Georgia is suggesting a law that would make it an “aggravated assault” for men to have sex without wearing a condom.
Dar’shun Kendrick’s new bill would require men to acquire permission from their sexual partner before getting a prescription for Viagra or similar erectile dysfunction medication.
The legislation would also create a 24-hour “waiting period” for men who wish to buy porn or sex toys in the state of Georgia and ban vasectomy procedures.
The Democrat member of the House of Representatives announced the bill, which is called a “testicular bill of rights”, in a tweet on Monday.
It would also “require DNA testing when a woman is six weeks and one day (to be performed before she is eight weeks) to determine the father of the child who shall IMMEDIATELY start paying child support”.
Ms Kendrick’s bill is a direct answer to the "heartbeat bill" passed by her Republican colleagues in the Georgia House of Representatives last week.
That bill would ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and aims to outlaw terminations carried out after a foetal heartbeat is detected. At six weeks, many women do not yet know they are pregnant.
Similar restrictions are under consideration in Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina.
During a tense debate last week, at least 20 Democrats, who oppose the restrictions, turned their back on the bill’s Republican author, Ed Setzler. About six female Democrats protested against the vote by walking out of the chamber.
Earlier in the day, some Democrats had brought in wire coat hangers, in reference to unsafe home abortions.
If the anti-abortion bill passes the Georgia Senate and is signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, it would be among the most restrictive in the US. Women in Georgia currently have the right to undergo an abortion up to 20 weeks into a pregnancy.
Ms Kendrick addressed the proposal during a radio interview on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Tuesday afternoon.
“If the state of Georgia is going to be concerned with regulating women’s reproductive rights, I think it’s only fitting that we also do that for men’s reproductive rights,” she said.
The politician said her proposal “really is to draw attention to what I think is an absurdity.” Ms Kendrick acknowledged vasectomy requirements or waiting times to buy sex toys are a “tongue-in-cheek response”.
However, she argued her concern about the heartbeat bill is serious, raising fears it could lead to an increase in the number of women who would subject themselves to unsafe abortions.
The Democrat, who has been a state legislator since 2011, hopes to have her counter-bill drafted by the end of the week.
Mr Setzler, the heartbeat bill’s sponsor, branded abortion a “barbaric procedure” and said women who become pregnant still have options under his proposal, citing carrying a pregnancy to term and putting the baby up for adoption. His bill makes exceptions in cases of rape or incest but only after an official police report has been filed.
Ms Kendrick said she deemed Georgia’s bill to be “definitely unconstitutional” and she felt her colleagues aimed for it to be a “test case for the Supreme Court” that might lead to overturning Roe v Wade – the landmark Supreme Court decision which legalised abortion nationwide in 1973.
Her bill is a ploy to raise alarm bells about the heartbeat bill and make a point about how it controls women’s bodies.
She urged citizens to attend the Senate’s next hearing for the fetal heartbeat bill which is scheduled for Thursday afternoon. “Pack. The. Room,” she tweeted.
The heartbeat bill will almost certainly trigger legal challenges if it is passed by Georgia’s state Senate and signed into law.
But anti-abortion activists hope that such a challenge will lead to the US Supreme Court reversing Roe vs Wade, especially with new conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh sitting on the court.
The Supreme Court has previously ruled that states cannot ban abortion before a foetus is viable - about 23 to 25 weeks.
While abortion has become an increasingly partisan issue in the US in recent years, this has significantly increased under the Trump administration as abortion rights have under fire from all angles.
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