The mainline anti-abortion movement has a problem it thinks a 15-week abortion ban can solve. Accomplishing its cherished dream of overturning Roe v. Wade has come at a cost. Many Republicans are squirming away from the anti-abortion cause as politically toxic, to the point that presidential front-runner Donald Trump seems to think he can blow off the movement entirely. Meanwhile, right-wing activists are fretting that abortion is still too accessible, with patients circumventing state bans via interstate travel or abortion pills by mail. New Guttmacher data even suggest the absolute number of legal abortions went up in the first half of this year.
Enter the 15-week ban, a purportedly moderate proposition that resurfaced at last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate. The pitch from the right is that even if abortion rights are more popular than ever, more of the public is still squeamish about terminations in the second trimester, and Republicans hope they can once again use later procedures to paint Democrats as the extremists of the abortion debate. In April, the historically powerful group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America made a national 15-week ban a litmus test in the Republican presidential primary and House and Senate races. And last week, under pressure from fellow hopeless candidate and South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Florida governor Ron DeSantis finally allowed that he would support a federal ban at 15 weeks’ gestation. Since DeSantis signed such a ban in Florida that is already in effect, followed by one at six weeks’ gestation, you may wonder why it took him so long.
Trump recently called DeSantis’s six-week ban “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake” despite his own judicial appointees making it possible. He has refused to directly answer questions about a national 15-week ban, saying last month, “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Trump said. “You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.” Even hard-line congressional Republicans seem to understand that actively endorsing a national ban represents a major escalation. Last year, colleagues of Senator Lindsey Graham complained that his 15-week ban was politically inconvenient; more recently, the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley fell back on states’ rights or openly conceded that the country just isn’t ready for a federal ban.
None of this is reason for supporters of abortion rights to be complacent. Republicans may be running scared from the effects of abortion bans now, but political tides shift. “You can’t rule out that, after winning an election, Trump might be more open for business with anti-abortion groups than he is now” if it suits his bid to stay in power, says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of several books about the anti-abortion movement.
Should the party truly get behind such a ban, it would have to confront the fact that a federal 15-week ban is not actually what the public has told pollsters they support. It won’t restore first-trimester abortion in red states and will only undermine the laws in blue states, as Robin Marty, executive director of what used to be the abortion clinic in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, observed.
That is, of course, part of the point for the anti-abortion faithful. “There’s a desire to shut down access in progressive states,” says Ziegler. “This has nothing to do with states’ rights — or democracy.”
Florida provides a preview of what is still being pitched as a middle ground. The 15-week ban contains some health exceptions, but in a brief opposing the law, doctors described their inadequacy. One recounted being forced to “wait and watch my patient’s condition deteriorate” after she began leaking amniotic fluid at 18 weeks, well before fetal viability. Instead of having an abortion, the patient developed sepsis and needed intensive care. “It was only then, when my patient was in the ICU dying of sepsis,” wrote the anonymous physician in the brief, “that the law allowed me to terminate her pregnancy and save her life.” Other patients with life-threatening conditions have traveled out of state.
Already, some patients who might have qualified for an exception owing to a fatal fetal diagnosis could get solid test results only after the 15-week cutoff, or, if they managed to get results in time, they have been rushed into a decision they otherwise would have wanted more time to consider. Florida is also a haven for out-of-state abortion seekers in the region who now have to muster the resources to travel and get an appointment, which can push back a procedure significantly.
“Bans equal delay equals abortions happen later. It’s very simple math,” says Erika Christensen, a later-abortion patient advocate and co-director of the organization Patient Forward. Christensen spends a lot of time trying to dispel misconceptions about later abortions, and not just among Republicans. Democrats, she says, have ceded ground when they talk about “codifying Roe” or otherwise writing new laws that enshrine abortion limits by gestational age. Across the country, the pro-choice side has scored political wins through a narrow focus on such medically dangerous or emotionally torturous cases — what Ziegler calls “abortion-rights incrementalism.”
There’s another way, she says, for progressives to think about all this haggling over gestational age, which takes into account the obviously sadistic cases but acknowledges that life can be more complicated than that. “According to the best research we have,” she says, “one in 13.5 pregnancies are discovered after 12 weeks, and that’s all pregnancies, not just ones that end in abortion. It’s incredibly common and puts a 15-week ban in perspective. That would give someone just a couple of weeks, depending on their financial and geographical situation.” Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of someone’s situation changing: new medical information, new life circumstances like a lost job or a partner’s abandonment.
Christensen also cringes when politicians and well-meaning advocates call abortions after the first trimester rare. That may technically be true, though she argues they are not as rare as CDC data suggest: The agency reported that in 2020, 5.8 percent of abortions occurred from 14 to 20 weeks, and less than one percent after 21 weeks, but that it didn’t get data from access-rich states like California and Maryland.
“The need is much higher than I think politicians and advocates are comfortable talking about,” Christensen says, “because the idea that later abortions are rare makes it easier to compromise on them.” She points out that progressives have begun explaining that exceptions don’t work in places with absolute bans, as in the case of the assaulted 12-year-old child in Mississippi who is now a mother. So why would they believe such policies would function well in blue states?
Before they were wiped from the books, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were their own form of compromise, allowing states to ban abortion after viability, usually understood to be 24 weeks, as long as there were health exceptions. Christensen believes this moment of outrage provides an opportunity to stop debating about gestational age and instead focus on enshrining abortion as an absolute right. Using the old frameworks, she says, “accepts the premise that there’s a reasonable point in pregnancy in which the state should be given authority to compel breeding.”
The liberal justices who dissented in Dobbs might not sign on to the notion that there should be no legal limits on abortion beyond health and safety or that the state has zero interest in what has loosely been referred to as “potential life.” Then again, maybe they would. “However divisive,” the justices wrote, “a right is not at the people’s mercy.”
More on life after roe
- ERA Ratification Is Now Up to Trump’s Supreme Court
- The Unlikely Reason RFK Jr. Could Be Rejected by the Senate
- Project 2025’s Mastermind Is Obsessed With Contraception
