A measure that passed Arizona’s Senate claims that it would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, but experts say that the bill is far more restrictive, effectively banning abortions after 18 weeks and declaring that a woman could be pregnant 2 weeks before she even had sex.
Arizona’s HB 2036 takes Nebraska’s 20-week abortion ban one step further by starting the clock on pregnancies at the woman’s last last menstrual period, which could be two weeks before fertilization.
Specifically, the bill would “[p]rohibit abortions at or after twenty weeks of gestation, except in cases of a medical emergency, based on the documented risks to women’s health and the strong medical evidence that unborn children feel pain during an abortion at that gestational age,” where gestational age is defined as “age of the unborn child as calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.”
Source: Mother Jones
