GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is set to introduce his 20-week abortion ban bill to the Senate on Thursday. That's the same bill that sparked
a mini-rebellion in the House GOP caucus among some of its slightly more moderate members.
The fact that Graham, a lifelong bachelor, feels qualified to put restrictions on when a woman might choose to terminate her pregnancy (which at 20 weeks is usually due to dire circumstances) defies logic. The bill is also going nowhere in the Senate since Democrats will surely block it. But most GOP presidential candidates support it and some reproductive rights advocates worry about the implications for how the issue will play in 2016. Tierney Sneed reports:
While the bans only apply to a relatively small portion of abortions, they are part of a much broader, long-term legal strategy among anti-abortion activists to push the Supreme Court into chipping away at some of the protections established in Roe v. Wade.
"It's a really dangerous trend. They look good to people, they make politicians feel good," said Jessie Hill, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. "There’s not a lot of sympathy for later abortion or people don't get the need for them."
Though they are rare, late-term abortions are crucial for women who discover fetal abnormalities late into their pregnancies, abortion rights activists say, and are even more necessary given other limits on abortion access are making it more difficult for women to seek the procedure.
Fourteen states have enacted 20-week abortion bans in the last five years and, unfortunately, the public generally favors them (a
Quinnipiac poll last year found 60 percent support).
But this largely seems like a messaging problem. If the public better understood the circumstances under which abortions are sometimes needed at 20 weeks, it seems like support would go down. And frankly, going after Lindsey Graham on this issue seems like the perfect opening.