The Florida Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a challenge to the state’s 15-week limit on abortion. In my opinion, all discussion of abortion limits should be accompanied by data indicating when most abortions take place. Without it, we get some rather unhinged rhetoric. As NR’s Ari Blaff reports, the ACLU claims that the “dangerous” Florida law has caused “chaos and devastation” in the state. Not to be outdone, Vice President Harris traveled to Tallahassee over the weekend to condemn the “extremists” who “attack the very foundations of freedom.”
Those characterizations are difficult to take seriously — not because of my personal views on abortion, but because, objectively speaking, a 15-week limit keeps almost all abortions legal. According to the Guttmacher Institute, two-thirds of abortions occur at eight weeks or earlier, while 88 percent are performed by twelve weeks and just 5.4 percent occur after 15 weeks.
A 15-week limit will probably reduce legal abortions by even less than that 5.4 percent figure. For one thing, the Florida law still permits abortions after 15 weeks when the woman’s life or physical health is threatened, or when the fetus has a fatal abnormality. Abortions undertaken for those reasons will continue under the new law. Furthermore, setting a 15-week limit may induce some women who would have had an elective abortion at 16 or 17 weeks to schedule the procedure sooner, thus shifting the timing but not actually reducing the incidence of such abortions.
To be sure, a 15-week limit will be an inconvenience and perhaps even a barrier for some small number of women with sympathetic cases, but the vast majority of abortions — probably more than 95 percent — will continue to be legally performed in the state. Claims that such limits “attack the very foundations of freedom” cannot be squared with the data — which is perhaps why the data are so often missing from the discussion.