Regulating Abortion Later in Pregnancy: Fetal-Centric Laws and the Erasure of Women's Subjectivity

In the United States, fetal development markers, including "viability" and the point when a fetus can "feel pain," have permeated the social imaginary of abortion, affecting public support for abortion and the legality and availability of care, but the extent to which these markers describe and orient the experience of abortion at later gestations is unclear.

Using interviews with 30 cisgender women in the United States who obtained an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy, the authors investigated whether and how notions of fetal viability and/or pain operated in the women's lived experiences of pregnancy and abortion.

According to respondents' accounts, fetal development-based laws restricting abortion based on purported points of fetal development operated as gestational limits, privileged the viability and pain status of the fetus over that of the prospective neonate, and failed to account for the viability and pain of the pregnant person.

The discursive practice of centering fetal development in regulating abortion access makes denial of abortion care because of the fetus's status conceptually available-even at the point of fertilization-and naturalizes the erasure of the subjectivity of women and others who can become pregnant.