Even when a law is described as banning abortions at six or eight weeks, some abortion rights advocates worry there is the potential for confusion. Doctors measure the start of pregnancy from the first day of a woman’s last menstrual period, which is usually two weeks before conception. As a result, some of the new laws would ban abortion as early as two weeks after a missed period, before many women realize they are pregnant.
But arguing on scientific or technical grounds has not proved especially effective for abortion rights supporters in the past.
Medical explanations of the term “partial birth abortion” in the late 1990s — a time when the number of Americans who said that abortion should be legal under all circumstances had dropped, to about one in four from one in three — did not prevent a ban of the procedure under federal law in 2003. The phrase refers to a later-term abortion procedure known as dilation and extraction.
Anti-abortion activists have also successfully pushed for bans on a procedure used in the vast majority of second-trimester abortions by labeling it “dismemberment abortion.” Doctors call the procedure a dilation and evacuation. The bans are in effect in two states, West Virginia and Mississippi.
“Medical procedures are not familiar to a lay audience, people don’t like to think about them, and they are hard to explain on a bumper sticker,” said Carole Joffe, a sociologist who studies abortion politics at the University of California, San Francisco. “That has put the pro-choice movement at a disadvantage.”
Slogans about keeping abortions “safe and legal” are fine, said Andrea Miller, an abortion rights supporter and president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, but fail to evoke the emotion that abortion rights opponents have managed to unleash. “When you zoom out from the legalese and you ground it in real people’s lives, you see greater support and mobilization.”
Mr. Gonidakis, of Ohio Right to Life, said he had taken note of some of the new terminology being floated by abortion rights proponents, like the #StopTheBans hashtag and references to “forced birth.”
“I’m not saying it’s not powerful,” he said. “I’m just saying, saving a baby with a beating heart is more powerful.”
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