Last Friday, Georgia’s Republican-controlled state House passed fetal heartbeat legislation by a near party-line vote of 92-78, with one Democrat voting for and five Republicans voting against the measure. Republican Governor Brian Kemp, a staunch pro-lifer, expended significant political capital to push the measure through the General Assembly, and he has vowed to sign the bill. In doing so Georgia joins Mississippi and Kentucky in passing fetal heartbeat legislation, with Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas expected to pass similar legislation soon.

Under the new law, abortion is prohibited after a fetal heartbeat is detected (generally occurring around six weeks gestation). It would also allow parents to claim babies in utero for tax purposes, and women to go after deadbeat dads for financial support for their pregnancies.

The law is certain to be challenged in court by pro-abortion groups, who will argue this law violates the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which established “viability” — the point where a pre-born child can survive outside the womb — as the point where abortion may be prohibited.

There has been a noticeable increase in abortion legislation recently, with New York gruesomely legalizing abortion up until the moment of birth, and Republicans narrowly blocking similar legislation in North Carolina. Other blue states like Delaware, Rhode Island, and New Mexico have also pushed bills radically expanding abortion.

So why the flurry of abortion legislation?

The obvious culprit is the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which shifted the ideological balance of the Court toward the Right. During Senate confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh repeatedly acknowledged Roe as a nearly 50-year precedent that he, as a lower-court judge, was bound to uphold. He would not, however, say whether Roe was constitutional, and for good reason.

While embracing the result of the Roe decision, numerous left-wing constitutional scholars admit the reasoning in Roe was deeply flawed from a constitutional perspective.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, whose students include Barack Obama, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Elena Kagan, said of Roe, “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”

And none other than the Notorious RBG, Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, said “Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify.”

Justice Clarence Thomas has long argued that respect for precedent is important, but that it’s not a reason to uphold constitutionally flawed rulings. Thomas is now joined by Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, who are much more likely to reverse prior rulings when warranted than many of their predecessors.

Even the majority opinion in Roe acknowledges that the state has “another important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life,” essentially confirming the validity of abortion restrictions the further gestation progresses.

One of the primary arguments in deciding Roe was the protection of women’s health, asserting that “now-established medical fact” showed that “until the end of the first trimester mortality in abortion may be less than mortality in normal childbirth.” In other words, women died less often from abortions than from childbirth. Yet the court noted, “It follows that, from and after this point, a State may regulate the abortion procedure to the extent that the regulation reasonably relates to the preservation and protection of maternal health.”

Then-Chief Justice Warren Berger, expressing his concern, said he was “troubled that the  Court has taken notice of various scientific and medical data in reaching its conclusion.”

Why? Because if later scientific evidence showed higher maternal mortality rates with abortion versus childbirth, then the primary rationale for legalized abortion would be undermined. As it turns out, we now know maternal mortality rates are 2-4X higher with abortion than childbirth.

This could be a key factor in deciding to reverse the holding in Roe, and the Roberts Court as now constituted seems far more likely to consider this new evidence, and even more likely if Justice Ginsburg, now 86 years old and in increasingly declining health, were replaced by another appointee by President Donald Trump.

In response to Georgia’s heartbeat bill, leftist Hollywood actors are threatening to boycott the state, which has topped Hollywood in film-production revenue. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “A record 455 productions were shot in Georgia in the last fiscal year, garnering a record $9.5 billion economic impact and $2.7 billion in direct spending.”

Such washed up luminaries as Amy Schumer, Amber Tamblyn, Alec Baldwin, Rosie O'Donnell, and Sean Penn signed onto a letter written by Alyssa Milano, who films her Netflix comedy “Insatiable” in Atlanta, opposing the law.

Though the Declaration of Independence lists the protection of the right to life as the foremost duty of government, these actors describe this bill protecting innocent human life as “evil.”

One wonders whether these actors grasp the irony and gross hypocrisy of being labeled “evil” by a group that has overlooked and covered up rapists and pedophiles in their ranks for decades. The sheer number of sexual predators among them is staggering.

These are people who literally gave a standing ovation to a man who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl before fleeing the country. Anyone with an ounce of moral decency would wear the contempt of such hypocrites as a badge of honor.

In defiance of the Hollywood crowd, Gov. Kemp declared, “We stand up for the innocent and speak for those who cannot speak for themselves… The legislature’s bold action reaffirms our priorities and who we are as a state.”

Exactly so, Governor.