NAF’s Policy Positions

Abortion access throughout pregnancy is paramount to ensuring providers and the patients they care for retain the ability to make decisions free from government interference. When politicians interfere with personal decisions about pregnancy, patients and providers face a heightened risk of maternal mortality, criminalization, forced medical interventions, and family policing.^[1]

National Abortion Federation (NAF) members — including independently-owned clinics, individual clinicians, and hospital-based providers — care for patients who often face delays to abortion care because of bans, restrictions, logistical barriers, and/or new information.^[2] While governments impose legal barriers like bans and restrictions that impact abortion access, these also exacerbate logistical barriers that include travel, cost, childcare, time off work, and wait times for appointments that further delay care. For those learning new information — a fetal diagnosis, discovering a pregnancy after a legal limit, or a lifechanging circumstance like job loss or a loss of a partner — bans and restrictions put health care decisions on an arbitrary legal timeline.

Abortion laws must support complex and individualized health care decisions. Rigid legal cutoffs that ban or restrict abortion care at viability or arbitrary gestational lines substitute political considerations for medical and personal decision making. Good abortion laws support principles of good medicine, which centers evidence-based clinical judgment and, most importantly, the patient’s decision. Policies must support and enable a person’s bodily autonomy.

Legal restrictions and bans like viability and gestation-based lines create dangerous environments for clinicians and patients. Viability is not a single, fixed point in pregnancy. It depends on clinical circumstances, fetal conditions, available medical resources, and the judgment of the patient and care team.^[3] Using viability or gestation as legal thresholds misrepresents how medical decision-making works and creates a legal, not medical, limit on abortion that contributes to an environment of surveillance and prosecution for pregnant people and providers. While viability and gestational cut-offs are often presented as merely reasonable limits on abortion, they are, in fact, abortion bans.

Abortion bans require enforcement, which disproportionately impacts people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and people with low incomes who already face a heightened risk of policing and surveillance. These same marginalized communities also face the greatest barriers to accessing affordable and timely health care. Patients seek abortion care throughout pregnancy based on their individual life circumstances, and deserve access to compassionate, evidence-based health care rather than categorical legal exclusion.

As the leading professional membership body for abortion providers nationwide, NAF supports abortion care and access throughout pregnancy and opposes legislation and policies that interfere with that care, including viability limits and gestation-based bans.

References

1. Pregnancy Justice. The Role of the Viability Line in Pregnancy Criminalization. From https://www.pregnancyjusticeus.org/resources/the-viability-line/. May 2, 2025
2. Kimport K. Is third-trimester abortion exceptional? Two pathways to abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy in the United States. Perspect Sex Reprod Health. 2022;54(2):38-45. doi: 10.1363/psrh.12190.
3. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Facts are important: understanding and navigating viability. From https://www.acog.org/advocacy/facts-are-important/understanding-and-navigating-viability. Accessed June 15, 2026.

The National Abortion Federation (NAF) is the leading national professional association for abortion providers. We unite, support, and represent abortion providers and the people they serve, in pursuit of accessible and equitable abortion care.

NAF and its members believe that abortion is a fundamental human right. Control over whether and when to become pregnant is a core component of the humanity of every woman and person capable of pregnancy—it is central to individual identity, and the right to control one’s fertility is an essential part of their right to full and equal participation in society. Ultimately, abortion gives women and pregnant people the opportunity to take control of their bodies and lives and make decisions about their futures.

Reproductive justice, a framework developed by Black women, expands on this concept, encompassing the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent children in safe and sustainable communities.

Reproductive coercion, by contrast, violates all of these principles. Reproductive coercion is a form of abuse involving the exertion of control over another person’s reproductive health and bodily autonomy. When perpetrated by an intimate partner, this abuse can take many forms — destroying birth control, sabotaging contraception, refusing condom use, or coercing pregnancy as a means of entrapment.[1] Once pregnancy occurs, abusers may escalate their control by preventing their partner from obtaining an abortion, knowing that forced parenthood can bind survivors to them for years through financial dependence, custody disputes, and ongoing violence.

Legislative and regulatory bans on abortion care are another form of reproductive coercion. Such bans use the force of law to remove an individual’s ability to make their own decisions about their body, health, family, and future. By eliminating abortion as an available option, the state substitutes its judgment for that of the pregnant person and compels them to continue a pregnancy against their will.

Reproductive coercion is not a new phenomenon. It has been a tool of oppression against Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities throughout U.S. history, and it has been perpetrated both outside and inside the medical profession, including via involuntary sterilization and unethical experimentation on BIPOC women.

No woman or person capable of pregnancy should ever be coerced, manipulated, or intimidated into continuing a pregnancy or becoming a parent. NAF and its members oppose efforts by governments and individuals to coerce, manipulate, or intimidate anyone into unwanted pregnancy and parenthood. Nor should any woman or person capable of pregnancy ever be coerced, manipulated, or intimidated into unwanted abortion.

Today, opponents of abortion access have tried to distort the concept of reproductive coercion by baselessly claiming telehealth abortion care enables abuse. This argument purposefully misrepresents reproductive coercion in order to advance an anti-abortion agenda that seeks to keep people pregnant against their will. NAF and its members understand that abortion care can, in fact, be an important pathway out of a coercive situation.

Reproductive coercion is a commonly reported reason patients seek abortion care, particularly patients experiencing intimate partner violence.[2,3] Research consistently shows that access to abortion can be a critical pathway to safety for survivors. Women and pregnant people who can obtain abortion care are more likely to leave abusive relationships and protect themselves and their children from future harm [1]. And medication abortion via telehealth allows for abortion access discreetly for those experiencing control by an abusive partner.

Reproductive coercion is a longstanding injustice that takes many forms and harms too many people. Individuals experiencing reproductive coercion already suffer from reduced agency over their lives; abortion bans only exacerbate this. NAF and its members oppose abortion bans as forms of reproductive coercion and will continue to work to remove barriers to full reproductive autonomy for all.

References

1. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Reproductive and sexual coercion. Committee Opinion No. 554. Obstet Gynecol. 2013;121:411-5.
2. Roberts SC, Biggs MA, Chibber KS, Gould H, Rocca CH, Foster DG. Risk of violence from the man involved in the pregnancy after receiving or being denied an abortion. BMC Med. 2014;12:144. doi:10.1186/s12916-014-0144-z.
3. Clark LE, Allen RH, Goyal V, Raker C, Gottlieb AS. Reproductive coercion and co-occurring intimate partner violence in obstetrics and gynecology patients. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2014;210(1):42.e1-42.e8. doi:10.1016/j.ajog.2013.09.019.