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.