TOLEDO, Ohio — The ACLU and Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court Tuesday to block Ohio's heartbeat law.
They want the court to order state officials to not enforce the law and declare it unconstitutional.
WTOL 11 talked to an OB/GYN and director of the Women's Center of Toledo, Dr. David Burkons, who is one of the plaintiffs in this case. He said this new heartbeat law has now effectively crippled the choice of abortion here in Ohio.
He added many women don't even know they're pregnant at six weeks.
He said now some patients have to decide within a matter of days whether or not to abort, while others have had to be turned away entirely.
Ohio's current law says a woman can no longer get an abortion following fetal cardiac activity, approximately six weeks after the time of conception. Berkons said at six weeks, the fetus is almost undetectable.
"It would take a microscope to find anything that looked like a fetus."
Burkons said a woman won't miss her period until two weeks after conception, leaving Ohio women with only four weeks to decide how they want to handle the pregnancy. With scheduling and waiting times, by the time they reach the clinic there could already be a heartbeat.
"Or we run into situations where they come in and there isn't a heartbeat on the day of the appointment, but we aren't allowed to schedule the surgery or the pill for at least 24 hours later, and then they come back, we have to repeat the ultrasound again and there is fetal cardiac activity and we have to send them away," Burkons said.
He said the patients turned away who can afford to travel to a state with longer legal abortion periods will do so, but low-income clients often can't afford the travel or the time off, and will possibly resort to more dangerous means, such as buying abortion drugs online.
"A lot of women are going to be in the emergency room and there's going to be some serious complications and probably some deaths from that."
Burkons said it's a huge reason why he and other abortion clinics across the state are trying to change the law in Ohio's Supreme Court. But he has little confidence in the lawsuit and said his advice to Ohio women now is if you're even a little bit suspicious that you're pregnant, to act as soon as possible.
"Take a pregnancy test and if you are indeed pregnant and you do want to consider getting an abortion, contact one of the few of us that are in the state as soon as you can."
With a bill in the Ohio Congress looking to make any abortions illegal, regardless of the amount of time, Burkons said he and the rest of the clinic are already prepared for clinics across the state to shut down, and pregnancy mortality rates to shoot up.