NC Senator Thom Tillis is wrong about abortion timeline
After the Senate bill that would protect abortion rights failed a vote, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis tweeted.
“Democrats are pushing radical legislation that would go beyond Roe v. Wade and allow abortion up until the moment of birth,” he wrote on Twitter, as well as his official press release on the matter. He says it’s the reason he voted against the bill.
That phrase, “allow abortion up until the moment of birth,” is fairly common rhetoric among the right. In a recent White House press conference, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked if President Joe Biden supported abortion up until the moment of birth. In the video, Press Secretary Jen Psaki doesn’t directly answer the question, and tells Doocy to refer to previous statements of Biden’s about his stance on abortion.
North Carolina’s Democratic Senate Candidate Cheri Beasley was similarly noncommital about the question. “As a former judge and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I know that women have a constitutional right to make decisions about their health care without the government interference,” Beasley said in a press statement. “Like the majority of North Carolinians, I support codifying Roe.”
People on the left tend to avoid answering this question, as it’s one that abortion rights activists see as asked in bad faith from some on the right. It is, however, a question people still have, not always in bad faith. It deserves an answer.
The Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022 did not explicitly say it was permitting abortions past the point of viability; the initial Roe v. Wade ruling said it was between 24 and 28 weeks except in cases of emergency. Instead, the Senate bill said there could be no restriction on abortion prior to “fetal viability,” nor could there be a prohibition after viability if a health care provider believes the “continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”
To take Tillis’s thoughts at face value, this could mean that there is a possibility of abortion “up to the moment of birth.” But those instances would be the choice between two lives: that of the pregnant person, and that of the fetus.
The reality is that less than one percent of abortions are performed after 20 weeks. A 1992 study estimated that 320 to 600 abortions happen after 26 weeks gestation annually, and abortion is currently at a historic low in the United States. On the other hand, 90 percent of abortions happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Costs and risks rise for abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The majority of these abortions are due to complications with the pregnancy, for either the fetus or the pregnant person (although cost creates another barrier for some). Considering that there are twice as many maternal deaths in the United States in comparison to other wealthy countries, the decision to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy shouldn’t be up to states; it should be up to the individual and their doctor. Roe v. Wade laid forth groundwork for after viability, and allowed states to ban it only if they had exceptions in place for pregnant people whose lives were threatened by the pregnancy.
The codification of abortion into national law would not lead to a jump in abortions after viability, because those types of abortions have an entirely different criteria. In fact, if it was easier to get an abortion — if there were cheaper procedures, or available through Medicaid and federal insurance, or there weren’t arbitrary restrictions adding costs to the bottom line — people would get them earlier. A study cited by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that of people getting abortions after 20 weeks, about 65 percent said that one barrier to getting the procedure done earlier was raising the money they needed for it.
Tillis’s misconception about abortions ultimately hurts someone’s ability to get an abortion at any time, even prior to viability, since he says it’s the reason he didn’t sign the Democrats’ bill into law. What he and others fail to realize is that in scenarios where a third trimester abortion is necessary, there is no reality where both the fetus and the pregnant person are allowed to live.
