Police officers would be granted the power to prevent women from having an abortion under a new bill proposed by a politician in Missouri.
Mike Moon, a Republican Missouri state representative who previously shared a video of himself decapitating a living chicken on Facebook to justify why abortion should be banned, introduced the controversial legislation.
The bill, which is termed the Right to Due Process Act, changes the definition of a fertilised egg to be a living person who possesses the constitutional rights of anyone else residing in the US.
Police and courts would subsequently be empowered to apply the proposed law, which would ultimately deem having an abortion to be equivalent to carrying out murder.
Mr Moon also submitted another piece of legislation to “abolish” abortion in Missouri that refers to “murder by abortion”. The stringent abortion ban would also criminalise having a pregnancy terminated in cases of rape and incest.
But the so-called Right to Due Process Act only has one co-sponsor, while the latter has none.
In the clip of Mr Moon beheading a chicken in 2017, the politician says “God gave us man dominion over life” just after he chops a bird’s head off with a knife.
“He allows us to raise animals properly and care for them and then process them for food so we can sustain life. And that’s what I’m doing here with this chicken. So we’ve been called back to this special session for the primary purpose of supporting life, protecting the unborn specifically.”
Prior to taking the bird’s heart out, he adds: “I think we need to get to the heart of the matter here”.
Mr Moon’s suggested law would not be enforceable because abortion remains legal in all 50 American states.
Missouri almost became the first state in America not to have an abortion clinic since Roe v Wade — the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion nationwide in 1973 but that is endangered by an abortion case timetabled to come before the court in March.
A judge blocked a Missouri law in August outlawing abortion at eight weeks’ gestation with no exemptions for cases which involve rape or incest.
