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Abortions Before Fetal Viability Are Legal: Might Science and the Change on the Supreme Court Undermine That?

Abortions Before Fetal Viability Are Legal: Might Science and the Change on the Supreme Court Undermine That?

The United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

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This article is part of the magazine, "The Future of Science In America: The Election Issue," co-published by LeapsMag, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and GOOD.

Viability—the potential for a fetus to survive outside the womb—is a core dividing line in American law. For almost 50 years, the Supreme Court of the United States has struck down laws that ban all or most abortions, ruling that women's constitutional rights include choosing to end pregnancies before the point of viability. Once viability is reached, however, states have a "compelling interest" in protecting fetal life. At that point, states can choose to ban or significantly restrict later-term abortions provided states allow an exception to preserve the life or health of the mother.

This distinction between a fetus that could survive outside its mother's body, albeit with significant medical intervention, and one that could not, is at the heart of the court's landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The framework of viability remains central to the country's abortion law today, even as some states have passed laws in the name of protecting women's health that significantly undermine Roe. Over the last 30 years, the Supreme Court has upheld these laws, which have the effect of restricting pre-viability abortion access, imposing mandatory waiting periods, requiring parental consent for minors, and placing restrictions on abortion providers.

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Josephine Johnston
Josephine Johnston is Director of Research and a Research Scholar at The Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York. She works on the ethics of emerging biotechnologies, particularly as used in human reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience. Her scholarly work has appeared in medical, scientific, policy, law, and bioethics journals, including New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Hastings Center Report, and Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. She has also written for Stat News, New Republic, Time, Washington Post, and The Scientist, and is frequently interviewed by journalists. Ms. Johnston holds degrees in law and bioethics from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her current research addresses developments in genetics, including prenatal testing, gene editing, and newborn sequencing.
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XPRIZE founder and chairman Peter Diamandis launches XPRIZE Healthspan at an event on November 29.

Hevolution Foundation

A new competition by the XPRIZE Foundation is offering $101 million to researchers who discover therapies that give a boost to people aged 65-80 so their bodies perform more like when they were middle-aged.

For today’s podcast episode, I talked with Dr. Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE’s founder and executive chairman. Under Peter’s leadership, XPRIZE has launched 27 previous competitions with over $300 million in prize purses. The latest contest aims to enhance healthspan, or the period of life when older people can play with their grandkids without any restriction, disability or disease. Such breakthroughs could help prevent chronic diseases that are closely linked to aging. These illnesses are costly to manage and threaten to overwhelm the healthcare system, as the number of Americans over age 65 is rising fast.

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Matt Fuchs

Matt Fuchs is the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org and Making Sense of Science. He is also a contributing reporter to the Washington Post and has written for the New York Times, Time Magazine, WIRED and the Washington Post Magazine, among other outlets. Follow him @fuchswriter.

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From infections with no symptoms to why men are more likely to be hospitalized in the ICU and die of COVID-19, new research shows that your genes play a significant role

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Bob Roehr
Bob Roehr is a biomedical journalist based in Washington, DC. Over the last twenty-five years he has written extensively for The BMJ, Scientific American, PNAS, Proto, and myriad other publications. He is primarily interested in HIV, infectious disease, immunology, and how growing knowledge of the microbiome is changing our understanding of health and disease. He is working on a book about the ways the body can at least partially control HIV and how that has influenced (or not) the search for a treatment and cure.