As Mark Wright mentioned, the latest NR is a special issue of proposals for a conservative agenda. It includes everything from letting seniors save money on health care to liberating entrepreneurs to compete with Big Tech. Some of these ideas should become Republican initiatives should they take one or both houses of Congress; some of them ought to be causes they are talking up right now on the campaign trail. In the latter category is the subject of my own contribution: a federal ban on abortions late in pregnancy.
As Matt Continetti notes in his column today, the abortion debate isn’t going well for Republicans right now. That fact is making Republicans in D.C. even more inclined to avoid the issue than they usually are. But that’s a mistake. They would be much better off, I argue, if they made a ban on late abortions — such as the 20-week ban most Senate Republicans have already voted for — a larger part of the national debate.
One issue I neglected to tackle in that article is the standard claim by opponents that abortions late in pregnancy are usually — some of them even say always — done because of serious threats to the mother’s life or severe fetal abnormalities. This claim almost never comes with any evidence for it and is advanced by people who show no interest in a ban that includes such exceptions.
Our data on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy is limited. What we have is not consistent with the claim that abortions after the 20th week are done overwhelmingly, or even mostly, because of serious medical complications. A 2013 paper notes that “data suggest that most women seeking later terminations” — they mean abortions after 20 weeks, most of them occurring “close to 20 weeks” — “are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” It cited another paper, based on 2008 data, that found that fetal abnormality was present in 0.6 percent of abortions in its sample after the 20th week (although it speculates there could be an undercount). And a 2022 study went into some of the reasons unrelated to health that late-term abortions were sought (e.g., because the mother did not know she was pregnant or lacked the money for an abortion until the third trimester).