What a reported Trump plan on restricting abortion would mean
A nationwide ban on abortions after 16 weeks of pregnancy — which Donald J. Trump is considering supporting, according to a New York Times report — would prevent very few abortions in the United States.
Mr. Trump, the front-runner to become the Republican presidential nominee, has not spoken publicly about the proposal. It would most likely keep more restrictive bans in place in the nearly half of states that have them, but would represent a change for states where abortion remains largely unrestricted.
Such a law, which would require congressional action, would only affect a small minority of women who seek abortions. Before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, only 4 percent of legal abortions occurred at 16 weeks or later. according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from 41 states in 2021, the most recent available. These women often have medically complicated pregnancies.
By supporting such a ban, Mr. Trump may be trying to thread a needle: He could take credit from conservatives for imposing more abortion restrictions, as he has for appointing three Supreme Court justices who helped to destroy Roe. But he could also try to appease more moderate Americans, who are wary of stricter abortion bans. The relatively small number of abortions that would be prevented, and the unpopularity of further abortion restrictions, as reflected in opinion polls, suggest that achieving this could be a difficult balancing act.
A national limit of sixteen weeks would be politically more popular among Americans than a complete abortion ban, but still not universally popular. About 40 percent of voters have said they are comfortable with abortion restrictions around that time during a woman's pregnancy, though public opinion on such issues is complicated.
It's also later than Mississippi's previous 15-week ban — the law at issue in the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion.
Who gets an abortion after 16 weeks?
The few people who have an abortion at this stage of pregnancy are likely to face serious health risks, says Dr. Maria Isabel Rodriguez, director of the Center for Reproductive Health Equity at Oregon Health and Science University.
“The people who want an abortion after 16 weeks, even if it is a small number of women, are the people most at risk of maternal mortality and disease,” she said.
Many of the most serious pregnancy complications happen late in pregnancy, and many fetal abnormalities, including those of the fetus' brain, spinal cord or heart, cannot be detected until after 16 weeks. They are often only found after 20 weeks of pregnancy, when doctors perform a major anatomical scan. Recent lawsuits have highlighted the experiences of women who learned of serious medical conditions after sixteen weeks of pregnancy, such as ruptured membranes or a fetus that developed without a skull.
Some women without medical problems also have abortions late in pregnancy because they learned they were pregnant late or had difficulty getting to an abortion provider earlier. Even in states where abortion remains legal, not all clinics offer abortions after the first trimester. Dr. Rodriguez said she believes that since Dobbs, more women in ban states are having abortions later in pregnancy because they had to arrange out-of-state travel.
Since Dobbs, there have been no major studies into the proportion of abortions that occurred after a termination of pregnancy. Twenty states restrict abortion before sixteen weeks; most of them ban it completely, and two, Arizona and Florida, ban it after fifteen weeks.
What is the political reason for a sixteen-week ban?
For Mr. Trump, a 16-week abortion ban could be the best option on a politically treacherous issue. Supporting such a policy would make him more moderate on the issue than many Republicans and could allow him to argue that other conservatives have gone too far. But it would also allow him to maintain some loyalty to the anti-abortion voters who supported him.
“We fully agree with President Trump on protecting babies from abortion violence after 16 weeks,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that has long supported expanded abortion restrictions.
But while a 16-week ban may seem like a middle-of-the-road position to some voters, it is not a popular political position. Even some voters who say they oppose second-trimester abortions have little interest in a nationwide ban. A New York Times/Siena College poll in July found voters opposed a 15-week federal ban, 53 percent to 38 percent, despite long-term polls This shows that a majority of Americans are against abortions after the first trimester.
In another Times/Siena poll, a generic Republican candidate who favored a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy had a one-point lead over a Democratic opponent. But a larger share of voters said they would prefer a Republican who leaves abortion policy to the states, the legal status quo.
How would it compare to other countries?
In some ways, a 16-week ban would make U.S. laws more similar to those of comparable countries. Only a dozen countries allow abortion after sixteen weeks without any restrictions; under Roe, the United States was part of a small group that did this until about 23 weeks. The most common limit value worldwide is 12 weeks. But many of those countries also have robust policies to allow exceptions.
“Almost all allow abortion on grounds that last longer than 16 weeks, such as risk to the person's mental health and in some cases the social and economic impact of the pregnancy,” said Katy Mayall, director of strategic initiatives at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which studies abortion laws around the world and challenges U.S. abortion restrictions in court.
The proposal Trump is said to be considering would have much more limited exceptions than European laws, which allow subsequent abortions only in cases of rape, incest or threats to the woman's life.
Recent experiences in states with similar abortion bans suggest that these exceptions will not be applied often. Because U.S. abortion laws tend to impose significant criminal penalties on medical providers, doctors are reluctant to perform abortions in unclear cases, even when there are serious threats to women's health.
Nate Cohn reporting contributed.