Why don’t you ask a living breathing human being who menstruates and votes.
There’s no reasonable way for me to know I’m pregnant until after I’m already six weeks in; therefore there’s no window for me to legally obtain an abortion. •••• “When you’re talking about laws like this… you really start to put women who have variations of a normal cycle or irregular cycles at risk of not even being able to catch that window wherein they could theoretically still have an abortion. And that’s not accident,” Dr. Conti says. “These people are doing this on purpose because the whole point isn’t to just arbitrarily cut it off at just six weeks. It’s to stop abortion all together.”
Let’s get real: a
six-week abortion ban is a total abortion ban. That’s true for all people who menstruate and can get pregnant, but it’s especially true for the many people like me who
get their period every six weeks.
On Tuesday, May 7,
Georgia successfully signed into law a so-called “
heartbeat bill” that will criminalize abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually about six weeks into a pregnancy. (Note: This is
not actually a heartbeat, but rather "cardiac activity.") Including Georgia, there are now
six states that have passed these six-week abortion bans, although none are currently in effect; some are scheduled to take place this summer or next year, while others have been stalled by court challenges.
As many abortion supporters
have pointed out in the week following the signing of Georgia’s new abortion restrictions, prohibiting abortion after six weeks functionally eliminates
all ability to get an abortion because most people will not realize they’re pregnant six weeks in.
Most people rely on a missed period to indicate the possibility of being pregnant — it’s the clearest early indicator of the body’s preparation for pregnancy. And yet menstruation can be incredibly unpredictable and vary from month to month. It’s not uncommon for a menstruating person to randomly have a period that comes several days late, and if you’re not closely tracking your cycle, it’s very easy to miss that more than a week has passed since the day your period was expected to come.
“In my career, I’ve only known a very small number of women who knew that they were pregnant in their fourth week [of pregnancy]. And those are people usually that have done IVF [in vitro fertilization] or IUI [intrauterine insemination] or something where they know exactly when they were fertilized,”
Dr. Jennifer Conti, a California-based ob-gyn and host of
The V Word podcast, tells
Teen Vogue. “Most people don’t know until they’ve actually missed a period.”
The math looks even more dire when you consider the many people whose menstrual cycles are regularly six weeks long, meaning their period doesn’t come every month but rather every six weeks. Although four weeks is the average timeline, anywhere from three to six weeks is within the normal range for a person’s menstrual cycle. My own cycle right now is about 42 days long.
“The average menstrual cycle is about 25-30 days, but it can be as short as 21 days or longer than 35 — it’s different from person to person,” the
Planned Parenthood website explains. “Some people’s periods are irregular a lot. It may just be the way their body naturally works, or it can be caused by a health problem.” England’s
National Health Service says the same: “The length of the menstrual cycle varies from woman to woman, but the average is to have periods every 28 days. Regular cycles that are longer or shorter than this, from 21 to 40 days, are normal.”
Several obstetrician-gynecologists tell me they regularly see people who have these longer cycles. “In reality it’s really not that common to have exactly 28-day cycles,” Dr. Conti says. “It’s not infrequent that I see people who have cycles like yours, cycles that come maybe every five weeks or every six weeks. … That’s still considered normal. They’re still ovulating regularly.”
When anti-abortion proponents
criticizecontextualizing pregnancy lengths in terms of missed periods, they’re being willfully ignorant to the lived realities of people with vaginas. If you’re not actively trying to conceive, how
else would you know if you’re pregnant other than via a missed period? Not all people show the classic pregnancy symptoms of vomiting and fatigue.
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