abortion rightsThe former vice president, who is seeking the White House in 2024, is the only major candidate who supports a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. He has advocated pulling from the market a widely used abortion pill that has a better safety record than penicillin and Viagra.
“One of the things that you cannot understate is the difficulty for a woman to carry a nonviable pregnancy,” said Alan Peaceman, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It is psychological torture to go out in the world, for people to see your pregnancy — and people will come up to you and want to talk about your pregnancy.
“They are often absolutely shocked to learn that the abortion laws also prohibit them from being able to get care to be safe,” she said, “even though they knew these laws were in place in this state.”declined to say whether they back Pence’s position. Trump, the early front-runner, has repeatedly said he backs exceptions in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother and has blamed hard-line abortion stances for costing the party in last year’s midterm elections.
While most favor at least some restrictions, a majority of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal during the first weeks of pregnancy, even in states with the strictest limits, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. There are a number of fetal conditions in which doctors generally agree there is “truly zero probability for a healthy outcome,” including anencephaly, a severe neural tube defect in which the skull doesn’t form and the brain is exposed, said David Hackney, a spokesperson for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and a high-risk obstetrician in the Cleveland area.
That’s what happened to Savita Halappanavar, the 31-year-old woman who died in Ireland in 2012 of sepsis after she was denied an abortion, prompting the country to overturn its longstanding ban. Nine states with abortion restrictions explicitly exempt cases of lethal fetal anomalies, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. Even in states with such exemptions, however, doctors say there can be confusion.