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Tonic

How Anti-Choice Lawmakers Are Getting Around Roe v. Wade

Those 20-week abortion bans you keep hearing about are unconstitutional.

Broken-hearted but matter-of-fact, my best friend told me there was a complication with her pregnancy. It was stage three twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. She explained that, with a shared placenta, too much blood was being transfused to Baby A at the expense of Baby B, and the condition was progressing fast—Baby B was showing signs of brain damage from the lack of blood and Baby A's heart was becoming dangerously enlarged.

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She traveled from New York to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for a battery of tests that quickly led to a procedure to terminate Baby B in order to save Baby A. She was 20 weeks pregnant. While a typical second-trimester abortion might involve injecting potassium into the heart of the unhealthy fetus, that's not an option when twins share a placenta. Instead, she underwent a laparoscopic procedure to deliver currents of heat directly to Baby B's umbilical cord. She had to carry both fetuses—one deceased, one healthy—until she gave birth several weeks later. If she had waited much longer to make a decision, both would have died.

According to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, only 1.3 percent of abortions in the United States happen at or after 21 weeks following the woman's last menstrual period (or LMP, the way doctors date a pregnancy); nearly 89 percent occur in the first 12 weeks. Yet those 1.3 percent of terminations have become a critical battleground in the war on abortion access.

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