Is Mississippi’s abortion law ex­treme? Should United States abortion laws more closely match those in the “progressive” nations of Western Europe?

Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, passed by a bipartisan vote in 2018, limits elective abortion to 15 weeks. “Elective abortion” refers to abortion on demand, the practice of seeking and obtaining an abortion without having to provide a reason, need, or justification. Although no reason, need, or just­ification exists for snuffing out the life of any human person, elective-abortion regimes ask no questions and close their eyes and ears to a woman’s taking the most defining course of action she ever will, forever changing her life and that of her child.

Under the weight of regulating this momentous decision, Mississippi reasonably placed limits on elective abortions so that they might not be performed after a point where science clearly demonstrates the humanity of the child in the womb. Mississippi’s 15-week limit is pragmatic rulemaking, according to which the state will ask no questions of a woman seeking elective abortion up until 15 weeks’ gestation; but farther than that, the state will not close its eyes and ears to the humanity of the child in the womb. The act is imperfect incrementalism, but Mis­si­s­sippi is far from alone in the global community in setting limits on elective abortion.

Mississippi’s 15-week law was invalidated by the lower federal courts and will be considered by the United States Supreme Court during oral arguments on December 1. In July 2021, I worked with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an organization that seeks to “promote deeper public understanding of the value of human life,” to prepare a report comparing Mississippi’s 15-Week Gestational Age Act with legal gestational limits in Europe. The report compares Missi­s­sippi’s Gestational Age Act with gestational limits in the abortion laws of Europe. We sought to answer the question, Is Mississippi extreme in its abortion policy compared with the international community? Specifically, is Mississippi’s 15-week law radically out of step with European countries, which are often characterized as progressive, permissive, and widely open to abortion?

Would you be surprised if I told you that Mississippi’s 15-week law is less restrictive than European abortion norms?

A comparative analysis between Mis­sis­sippi and European abortion laws shows that most Euro­pean nations limit elective abortion to less than 15 weeks’ gestation, and in fact most of them to less than twelve weeks’. Of 50 European cou­n­tries analyzed in the report, eight do not allow elective abortion at all, and 39 limit elective abortion to 15 weeks’ gestation or earlier.

Right out of the gate, the abortion laws of eight European countries are more restrictive than Mississippi’s. These countries either prohibit abortion altogether (Andorra, Malta, and San Marino) or allow abortion only for specific reasons such as socioeconomic grounds, fetal abnorm­alities, rape or incest, or the need to preserve the health of the mother (Great Britain, Finland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Poland).

Some Americans see the U.K. as a trailblazing model for how to approach progressive social issues, so they might be surprised to learn that it restricts abortion more than the United States does. Great Britain still requires a woman to provide some justification — such as one based on “broad socioeconomic grounds” — before she may legally obtain an abortion.

In 2013, an article by Emily Matchar in The Atlantic explained the Finnish abortion landscape and how it differs from the no-questions-asked approach of elective-abortion countries:

But even for early abortions [in Finland], women must provide a “social reason” for seeking to terminate her pregnancy, such as poverty, extreme distress, or already having at least four children. While in practice most abortion requests are granted, it still forces women to prove to an authority the validity of their desire not to have a baby.

Out of the 42 remaining European countries that allow elective abortion, 39 countries limit elective abortion to 15 weeks’ gestation or earlier. The majority of these 39 European countries set gestational limits for elective abortion at or before twelve weeks’ gestation.

Five European countries limit elective abortion to ten weeks’ gestation: Croatia, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey.

Twenty-seven European countries limit elective abortion to twelve weeks’ gestation: Albania, Armenia, Azerb­aijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herze­govina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mont­enegro, Moldova, Northern Ireland, North Macedonia, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Ukraine.

Two European countries limit elective abortion to between twelve and 14 weeks’ gestation: Austria and Italy, both of which limit it to 90 days, or three months.

Five European countries limit elective abortion to 14 weeks’ gestation: Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, and Spain.

Only three European countries permit elective abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation: Iceland, 22 weeks; the Netherlands, 24 weeks; and Sweden, 18 weeks.

In America, if most states enacted laws that limited elective abortion to the first trimester, it would cause a national uproar — or it would do so if abortion advocates were correct in their assertion that most Americans support women’s having access to abortion throughout all nine months of preg­nancy. There seems, however, to be very little uproar from any corner over the fact that 47 out of 50 European countries have more restrictive limits on elective abortion than Mississippi’s law establishes. The law looks main­stream, and even permissive, by European standards.

Recently, the Washington Post ­pub­lished a piece titled “How Abortion Laws in the U.S. Compare to Those in Other Countries,” comparing nations where “abortion is broadly legal” to weave a narrative that the global trend is toward abortion permiss­iveness. But even the Washington Post acknowledged the truth that “many European countries limit on-request abortions to the first trimester” and called this “more restrictive than much of the United States.” Matchar came to a similar conclusion in her 2013 Atlantic article: “I assumed that Western Europe would be the land of abortion on demand, likely government-subsidized, and possibly with a free bag of condoms afterward. But as it turns out, abortion laws in Europe are both more restrictive and more complicated than that.”

By any measure of international comparison, Mississippi’s 15-week abortion law is mainstream and falls within the same gestational framework as laws in most of the world’s nations. If the United States Supreme Court allows Mississippi to become one of many states that desire to draw a bright-line gestational limit on elective abortion to protect the unborn, Mississippi will certainly not be alone in the inter­national community, which has largely done the same.