Abortion legislation in Georgia and Alabama ascended in the news cycle this week, with Georgia’s governor signing a “heartbeat bill” into law on Tuesday and Alabama’s Senate postponing until next week its vote on a near-total abortion ban.

The Georgia law will ban abortions after a doctor is able to detect “a fetal heartbeat in the womb,” usually at about six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. It was one of the nation’s most stringent proposals until the all-out ban introduced in Alabama.

Under the proposed Alabama bill, doctors would not be able to perform the procedure once a fetus is “in utero.” That version caught national attention because the bill that passed in the House allowed for a single exception, in cases involving a serious health risk “to the unborn child’s mother.” Cases of rape and incest were not exempt as they are in other states.

The abortion bills are not simple.

“In Georgia, you have to go down a rabbit hole and have to be a lawyer to understand what you’re reading,” said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, director of Planned Parenthood state media campaigns.

Since Tuesday, fear has spread, confusing further reporting on the bills. Information has been misconstrued, criminal penalties have been misstated, and social media platforms have morphed into prime false-narrative territory.

And while there has been much attention on the issue of bans on early-stage abortions, women who miscarry are not going to be sent to prison for life.

So, let’s correct the record.

Abortion is not outlawed right now.

Neither Alabama’s proposed ban nor Georgia’s abortion law is currently in effect.

The Georgia law is scheduled to become enforceable in 2020, though “everyone in America expects it will be challenged in court before then,” said Mary Ziegler, professor at Florida State University College of Law and author of “After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate.” “Courts may block it from being enforced even in 2020.”

The bill introduced in Alabama was tabled on Thursday; because it was not passed, there is nothing to enforce. Other states, including Mississippi and Ohio, recently passed “heartbeat” laws. Neither state’s law is currently in effect either.

[Graphic: Which states are blocking abortion — and which are enacting protections?]

State Rep. Terri Collins (R), who sponsored the hotly debated Alabama bill, reiterated during an interview on Friday with The Post that abortions are currently allowed in the state. The bill must pass through the Senate and then the governor must sign it. It will take an additional six months after that to go into effect.

Several states have signed abortion legislation into law, but any law that has moved through the courts has ultimately been blocked or struck down, Zeigler said. Iowa, North Dakota and Kentucky have seen related laws blocked.

“Women who are panicked should know they have time,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, and patients should not cancel their appointments.

Kolbi-Molinas was also confident that the ACLU would “be able to overturn these laws because they violate decades of Supreme Court laws.”

“We’ve been inundated with calls from patients who think abortions are already illegal,” said Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast. “They don’t understand that we’ll challenge this in court and it will likely be blocked.”

What worries her more, though, are the patients who aren’t calling. They need to know that “compassionate, nonjudgmental care is still legal.”

[Opinion: Republicans have stopped pretending on abortion]

Women in Alabama and Georgia will not be criminalized

Unlike other states — which have passed limited abortion bills such as bans on the types of abortion procedure and gestational age of the fetus — Alabama’s proposed bill is an all-out ban on abortion.

“This bill is very simple,” said Collins. “It’s not about birth control or the morning after the pill. It’s about not allowing abortion once the woman is pregnant. The entire bill was designed to overturn [Roe v. Wade] and allow states to decide what is best for them.”

However, the bill explicitly states that women are exempt from criminal and civil liability, a tenet that Alabama lawmakers have repeatedly reinforced.

“In my bill, women would not under any circumstances face jail time if they got an abortion,” Collins said. Instead, the law targets doctors, who can be prosecuted for performing an abortion, a felony punishable by up to 99 years imprisonment.

Carol Sanger, professor at Columbia Law School, said such penalties on doctors were “just another way to make women frightened” and create “more disincentives for physicians and residents to take up this practice.”

The Georgia law is more complex.

Like Alabama, it explicitly states that doctors who perform abortions will be prosecuted. It is clear about those penalties. The bill is more vague about the prosecution (or non-prosecution) of women.

On Tuesday, Slate published an article with a not-entirely-accurate headline: “Georgia just criminalized abortion. Women who terminate their pregnancies would receive life in prison.”

It suggested that under the Georgia law, women who terminate their pregnancies would be prosecuted and sentenced to either life in prison or death.

That is incorrect.

“The news headlines and social media headlines that speculate about the bills’ unintended consequences are – at the very least – not productive. At most, they’re harmful,” Planned Parenthood’s Staci Fox told The Post on Friday.

HB 481 could not be used to successfully prosecute women, she argued. But if a woman had a miscarriage, she could be pulled into an investigation looking at whether someone performed an illegal abortion on her.

“You don’t want a woman to be forced to prove how she lost her baby,” said Sanger.

Georgia’s law does not unequivocally say that women are exempt, but legal experts point to other areas of Georgia’s penal code which have specific defenses for women, including those who miscarry.

A Roe v. Wade challenge is the goal

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided that the right to privacy and liberty was broad enough to encompass a woman’s choice to continue her pregnancy with consulting with her doctor.

“In addition to giving women the right to choose whether to terminate a pregnant, the court also said that right is not absolute and there are certain rules that govern how long that right lasts,” Sanger explained. To do that, it looks to trimesters and viability, ignoring that reason a woman chose to have an abortion.

The recent spate of abortion bills that try to ban abortion early into pregnancy focus on duration — some states picked 16 weeks, others (like Georgia) are down to six. Alabama took it one step further. Under the new legislation, the state has said all it requires is pregnancy.

“By making the fetus a person, it’s an end run around Roe,” she said. “Once you determine a fetus is a person, you can’t kill.”

For Collins, the Alabama state representative, the bill’s true purpose is to trigger litigation that would force the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade.

[At least 20 abortion cases are in the pipeline to the Supreme Court. Any one could gut Roe v. Wade.]

“My point on keeping an amendment about rape or incest out of this bill is that Roe v. Wade does not mention that issue and I want this bill to focus on the reasoning used in the Roe v. Wade decision, ‘Is the baby in the womb a person?’ Any amendment would contradict that point.”

Even in Alabama, it seems, there’s still a dispute over why a woman should be able to have an abortion.

“That’s what Roe is all about — no one should be able to decide why a woman should have an abortion,” Sanger said.

The Supreme Court decides which cases it wants to hear, and legal experts believe there are some things to suggest the court would not take one of the length-of-pregnancy ban cases.

The justices generally feel obligated to take cases in which lower courts disagree about the law or the court’s precedents. So far, no court has upheld one of the durational requirements, Sanger said.

The antiabortion legal and political community seems confident it has the votes to overrule Roe.

“They’re saying, ‘We dare you to take us to court because we think we’ll win,’” Collins said, but there are rules that govern when it’s appropriate for the Supreme Court to overturn a case.

Courts generally abide by a doctrine known as stare decisis, or respecting settled law. But the Supreme Court can revisit its precedents, which is what gives hope to abortion opponents.

Read more:

A sponsor of an Ohio abortion bill thinks you can reimplant ectopic pregnancies. You can’t.

Georgia governor signs ‘heartbeat bill,’ one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation

Alabama Senate delays vote on nation’s strictest abortion bill

President Trump ran for office vowing to extricate the United States from entanglements abroad. But his administration now finds itself juggling three national security crises overseas — with Iran, Venezuela and North Korea — while confronting China over a possible trade war.

The situation is partly a function of uncontrollable events but also the result of Trump’s “go big or go home” approach to foreign affairs, which has led his administration to apply “maximum pressure” to multiple nations simultaneously, rather than prioritize one over the other or take incremental steps.

The maximalist tactics at times have raised the prospect of big breakthroughs, ones that Trump hopes to take to the campaign trail for his reelection, particularly when it comes to North Korea. At the same time, it has brought what former policymakers describe as a greater risk of crises and miscalculations, as well as possible distractions from the primary goal of the administration’s national security strategy: countering Russia and China.

“The president’s apparent tendency to brinkmanship brings with it a degree of danger — and it’s even more dangerous when it’s combined with a pattern of bluffing,” said James Dobbins, a former top diplomat who is now a senior fellow at the Rand Corp.

Whether Trump is willing to pursue military action, which he and his aides have referenced in public remarks, is a looming question. He has long been a vocal skeptic of American military force abroad and at times has expressed concern about the more hawkish impulses of his national security adviser, John Bolton. Strategy experts cite the risk of overextending U.S. rhetoric in conflicts with possible military outcomes if the president isn’t willing to back words with actions.

“It’s kind of like the not terribly capable bully, who likes pushing people around and teasing them, but when push comes to shove, is nervous to actually get into a bar fight,” said Mara Karlin, a former Pentagon strategist during the Obama administration and a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Trump administration officials dispute that the president is engaging in any reckless brinkmanship. They point out that Trump and his top advisers primarily voice Washington’s desire for peaceful resolutions to the confrontations with North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, and note that he has reinvigorated the diplomatic track with Pyongyang, brokering the suspension of menacing intercontinental ballistic missile tests. This past week, Trump extended an olive branch to Iran, saying “I’d like to see them call me,” even as his top aides lambasted the country and the U.S. military said it would respond to any attack on American interests with unrelenting force.

“The administration continues to leverage diplomacy, pursue economic pressure, and enforce existing laws to deter malign actors seeking to threaten stability and security,” a senior administration official said in a statement. “The United States, though, remains prepared to respond to any threats against America or our allies.”

The official defended the efficacy and rationale of the administration’s approach. “The United States is responding to legitimate threats against America and our allies and partners with highly effective maximum pressure campaigns,” the official said. 

The possibility that Trump’s resolve could be tested has increased in recent days.

In Asia, progress in talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un showed signs of backsliding, as the United States seized a North Korean vessel allegedly used for evading sanctions and suspended efforts to recover remains of American military personnel killed during the Korean War. Pyongyang, for its part, carried out new short-range missile tests, raising the possibility of a return to intercontinental ballistic missile testing it suspended after talks with Trump.

In South America, top administration officials suggested the possibility of military action against Venezuela after a failed insurrection by the U.S.-backed opposition took officials in Washington off guard. The U.S. military sent a hospital ship to the nation’s coast in between preparing for contingencies should Nicolás Maduro’s government fall.

Perhaps the most concerning developments arose out of the Middle East. A year after Trump pulled out of the Iranian nuclear accord, Tehran announced that it would stop complying with some elements of the agreement, promising to enrich uranium to a higher level than allowed under the treaty. The decision once again raised the threat of nuclear proliferation in one of the most unstable parts of the world.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon dispatched a carrier strike group, a bomber force and a Patriot missile battery to the Middle East after receiving intelligence suggesting that Iran could be preparing an attack against U.S. troops or interests in the region.

As the crises with North Korea, Venezuela and Iran unfold, one risk is that the Trump administration will lose focus on a national security strategy that calls for concentrating primarily on Russia and China.

In recent weeks, Trump’s top national security officials, including Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have spent most of their public messaging time talking about those three situations rather than about longer-term threats.

 James Carafano, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, said he didn’t see the developments as a drift away from the strategy, but rather as inevitable confrontations, noting that the strategy shift was less about abandoning them and more about lessening focus on transnational terrorism.

“A big part of Venezuela is the U.S. showing the Russians and the Chinese it’s going to maintain dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” he said. “Iran is always part of the mix because it’s the chief destabilizer in the Middle East. And North Korea directly threatened the United States.” 

A senior State Department official said dealing with these brewing crises hasn’t taken away from the Trump administration’s focus on Beijing and Moscow.

The United States has tried to curb the expansion of Chinese firms such as Huawei and China Mobile, albeit with mixed success. Washington has called out the alleged mistreatment of China’s Muslim minority population and blocked certain Chinese investments. 

The State Department official noted the wide array of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, poisoning a former Russian spy in Britain and intervening in Ukraine, though the punishments largely came at the urging of Congress. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss administration strategy.

The Trump administration has worked relatively closely with allies on its approach to Venezuela, but it has broken with allies in Europe over Iran and at times has clashed with South Korea over how to handle talks with the Kim regime. 

“The world is changing, and the United States’ ability to manage things in the way it used to, believing we had the wisdom and the foresight and the resources to tackle all things simultaneously, and other countries were inclined to go along, that’s definitely changed,” said Chris Preble, vice president for foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. 

Against the backdrop of confrontations with North Korea, Venezuela and Iran, Trump has also been applying economic pressure to China, most recently hiking U.S. tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. 

Apart from a high-profile strike on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s air force in 2017 over chemical weapons use, and the continuation of operations in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, Trump has largely been skeptical of taking new military actions. With China, however, he has demonstrated a comfort with employing blunt economic force. 

“The one source of some comfort is that Trump does seem to be risk-averse when it comes to military action, and I’m sure the U.S. military are reinforcing him in that regard,” Dobbins said. “The more dangerous of these situations in the short to medium term is probably the Chinese one, since that’s an area where he has been less risk-averse.”

Carol Morello contributed to this report.

President Trump on Saturday took a swipe at Donald McGahn, saying the former White House counsel “had a much better chance of being fired” than special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Trump’s remarks, made in an evening tweet, came after reports that McGahn had declined a request by the president last month to issue a public statement that he did not believe Trump had engaged in criminal conduct when he sought to exert control over the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

“I was NOT going to fire Bob Mueller, and did not fire Bob Mueller,” Trump said in the tweet. “In fact, he was allowed to finish his Report with unprecedented help from the Trump Administration. Actually, lawyer Don McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than Mueller. Never a big fan!”

McGahn had told the special counsel’s office that he did not think Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, two people familiar with his interviews told The Washington Post.

According to people familiar with the discussions, the White House contacted an attorney for McGahn requesting a statement making public what McGahn had told Mueller’s team.

But the lawyer declined on McGahn’s behalf, in part because Attorney General William P. Barr had already concluded that there was insufficient evidence to accuse Trump of criminal obstruction.

Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.