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Nebraska antiabortion groups and GOP lawmakers were stunned. In late April, their effort to ban most abortions was tanked by an unlikely person: 80-year-old Sen. Merv Riepe, a longtime Republican.
Instead, on Friday, Nebraska’s conservative legislature voted to ban abortions at 12 weeks of pregnancy — a threshold that significantly narrows the window for legal abortions but still allows the vast majority to occur.
A few days earlier, North Carolina Republicans used their legislative supermajority to enact a similar 12-week ban, calling it a “mainstream” approach that would be more broadly accepted than the stricter bans many conservatives had sought to pass. And in neighboring South Carolina, state Sen. Katrina Shealy (R) told The Washington Post that she and the other female GOP senators who blocked a near-total ban are planning to push for a 12-week ban on most abortions when the state Senate takes up a bill next week restricting abortion after…
This article was written by Rachel Roubein and originally published on www.washingtonpost.com