Abortion Bans and Abortion Care “Later” in Pregnancy
What are abortion bans?
Abortion bans are policies that criminalize abortion care, often based solely on the gestation of a pregnancy. These laws typically threaten medical providers with fines and penalties and result in delays and denials of medical care.
As a pregnancy progresses, the cost of abortion increases, the number of providers decreases, and more state-level restrictions go into effect. Each of these factors compounds the others and restrictions fall mainly on vulnerable populations. No ban is reasonable when someone is faced with the need to make life-altering decisions.
What about “viability”?
The potential viability of any unique pregnancy is unknowable, and is much more complicated than gestational age. Fetal development is only one piece of information patients and medical professionals may be weighing when making decisions about a pregnancy– someone’s health and the well-being of their family, including existing children, are often important considerations.
What about “fetal pain”?
According to a multidisciplinary review by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (RCOG), "pain has no meaning without conscious awareness, and current evidence best supports lack of awareness through birth." In short, there is no medical consensus around the potential for a fetus to experience pain and punitive legal restrictions are the wrong tool to address genuine concerns.
How are abortion bans harmful?
Bans Create Pressure: Drawing strict lines on abortion access can pressure pregnant individuals to make decisions before they are ready or able to gather all of the information they need to make their decisions.
Bans Exacerbate Inequities: When someone is unable to obtain a desired abortion, research indicates that they are worse off– more likely to live below the poverty line, stay with an abusive partner, suffer adverse health outcomes, and they are less likely to realize life plans.
Bans Burden Access: When someone has decided to seek an abortion, bans delay care, pushing them further into pregnancy or deny their ability to access care altogether.
Who is most affected by abortion bans?
Abortion bans have a disproportionate impact on groups that are overrepresented among later abortion seekers and abortion seekers more broadly, particularly women of color and especially Black women, women who are young, have limited financial resources, who have to travel farther to reach care, and who have discovered their pregnancy later. These characteristics are correlated with institutional & systemic inequity.
Gestational age bans, at any point in pregnancy, represent a knowing and willful use of state power to compel childbearing without regard for the consequences.
– Megan K Donovan, Guttmacher Institute
What’s important to know about later abortion:
People are confident in their decision to get an abortion, with (95%) of people saying it was the right decision for them and the most common emotion reported is relief.
A pregnancy is called "full-term" at 40 weeks. Almost all (90%) abortions take place before the 12th week of pregnancy. Abortions after 20 weeks represent a small percentage of all abortions, and most occur before 24 weeks as they become increasingly rare with each week of pregnancy.
Abortion is safe throughout pregnancy. The abortion complication rate is much lower than the rate of complications experienced during pregnancy or during common procedures such as widsom tooth extraction.
Later abortion care is expensive; the average cost for an abortion later in pregnancy is over $2,000, but it can cost upwards of $10,000 or more. Most abortion seekers live below the Federal Poverty Level and are unable to use Medicaid to pay for care.
Many people are not able to access desired abortion care. Researchers estimate over 4000 abortion seekers who make it to clinics are unable to access desired abortions due to gestational limits and approximately one in four of women who would have Medicaid-funded abortions instead give birth when this funding is unavailable.
Why do people seek abortions later in pregnancy?
People seek abortions later in pregnancy for the same reasons they do earlier in pregnancy, but many are not able to access care as soon as they would like due to compounding delays. They are more likely to have discovered their pregnancy late and then have difficulty overcoming legal, financial, and logistical barriers in trying to obtain an abortion. Some find out new information about their own health or their pregnancy that they couldn’t have known earlier. Each person’s circumstances are unique, but once someone has decided to get an abortion, they should be able to get care without delay, without judgement and without going broke.
Video: Why people have abortions and why they have later abortions
Lecture from the Turnaway Study Lecture Series wherein Dr. Diana Greene Foster, principal investigator of the Turnaway Study, breaks down key findings from her research on later abortion seekers.
The Turnaway Study, a project of UCSF’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), examined the effects of unwanted pregnancy on women, children and families. It describes the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to being denied and carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. Over the course of ten years, they collected and examined data from nearly 1,000 women at 30 abortion facilities across the U.S. to determine the impact of having or being denied an abortion. The study is critical to understanding later abortion, and later abortion seekers. More can be found at turnawaystudy.com