Want an Abortion This Year? Get Ready to Wait

Conservatives are pushing a record number of laws to delay women from having an abortion.

bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For women seeking an abortion, 2015 is shaping up to be the year of the long wait.

Since the beginning of the year, six states have proposed or passed laws that would require a woman to wait days before she has an abortion—laws that critics say place an especially harsh burden on poor and rural women.

Conservative lawmakers in Arkansas and Tennessee have passed bills forcing women seeking abortions to attend an initial appointment and then wait 48 hours before the actual procedure. The Florida Legislature has passed a measure, which GOP Gov. Rick Scott promises to sign, creating a 24-hour waiting period between two appointments. A bill that died in Kentucky, which already requires women to receive counseling 24 hours before an abortion, would have forced women to receive that counseling in person.

And Oklahoma and North Carolina are poised to pass bills that would institute the longest waiting periods in the county: 72 hours between mandatory counseling and an abortion. The North Carolina proposal passed the Republican-dominated House on Thursday, and Oklahoma’s measure is awaiting the signature of Republican Gov. Mary Fallin. If the states approve the measures, Oklahoma and North Carolina will join Missouri, South Dakota, and Utah as the only other states with three-day waiting periods.

“This is a new trend, the number of states passing these laws,” says Elizabeth Nash, a states issues researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that supports abortion rights. Conservative states have passed scores of new anti-abortion laws since Republicans took over state legislatures and governorships en masse in 2010. But until recently, very few of those new laws established or extended waiting periods.

Last year, though, lawmakers in Missouri made national headlines when they passed a law requiring a woman to schedule two appointments 72 hours apart before obtaining an abortion. “That seemed to be the tipping point,” Nash says. “All of a sudden, this was back on the radar. We hadn’t been seeing waiting period bills for years. And now this year, lawmakers are saying to themselves, ‘Wait, we can do that?'”

The new laws, Nash says, will make the logistics of obtaining an abortion much more difficult for women who are already juggling families and jobs.

“We hadn’t been seeing waiting period bills for years. And now this year, lawmakers are saying to themselves, ‘Wait, we can do that?'”

Research shows that waiting periods requiring patients to make two trips to an abortion clinic spur some women to travel across state lines for abortions, according to a review, by Guttmacher, of a dozen studies that looked at the effects of laws that delay abortion. The laws may also push more procedures into the second trimester of pregnancy, when an abortion is more physically taxing and more expensive.

Supporters of mandatory waiting periods often argue that they cause uninformed or uncertain women to reconsider abortion. State Rep. Jennifer Sullivan, the sponsor of Florida’s 24-hour bill, said recently that her bill is aimed at “empowering women to make this decision,” especially since most women “do not understand the medical complications” related to abortion.

But abortion rights supporters note that studies show 87 to 93 percent of women are certain of their decision when they make their appointment.

Still, in all five states that have approved or are about to approve new or longer waiting periods this year, Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion, and the bills are facing little opposition.

In North Carolina, the site of numerous battles over reproductive rights since the Republican takeover, the 72-hour proposal has advanced with comparatively little fanfare. That may be because, unlike laws in Missouri, South Dakota, and Utah, the proposed legislation in North Carolina and Oklahoma would not require a woman to make two separate trips to the clinic. The initial consultation with an abortion clinic can take place over the phone.

And Tennessee has already weathered a long fight over waiting periods: The current proposal, which is on its way to Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s desk, is the result of a bitter battle that played out during the 2014 election season. That year, Tennessee voters approved a ballot measure that allowed the Legislature to pass a host of anti-abortion restrictions previously blocked by a state Supreme Court ruling.

Opponents of waiting periods have mounted their biggest fight in Florida. On Monday, standing outside the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) decried the measure as “medically unnecessary and morally reprehensible.”

But beyond denouncing these laws, there isn’t much abortion rights advocates can do to oppose them. The Supreme Court ruled waiting periods constitutional in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, in 1992.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate