NEW YORK — In a Republican presidential discipline stuffed with candidates against abortion rights, Mike Pence stands out in his embrace of the trigger.

The former vice chairman, who's looking for the White House in 2024, is the one main candidate who helps a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, earlier than many ladies know they’re pregnant. He has advocated pulling from the market a broadly used abortion tablet that has a greater security document than penicillin and Viagra. And he’s implored his Republican rivals to again a 15-week federal ban at the least nationwide normal, which a number of haven't performed.

In a current interview, Pence went even additional, saying abortion must be banned when a being pregnant isn’t viable. Such a normal would drive girls to hold pregnancies to time period even when medical doctors have decided there isn't any likelihood a child will survive exterior the womb.

“I’m pro-life. I don’t apologize for it,” Pence mentioned within the interview. “I just have heard so many stories over the years of courageous women and families who were told that their unborn child would not go to term or would not survive. And then they had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery.”

Doctors disputed Pence’s characterization, saying there are situations which might be at all times incompatible with life and others the place the possibility of survival is so slim that almost all sufferers, when beforehand given the selection, concluded that persevering with the being pregnant wasn’t well worth the struggling, grief or danger.

Pence, nevertheless, says he’s undeterred.

“I want to always err on the side of life,” he mentioned. “I would hold that view in these matters because … I honestly believe that we got this extraordinary opportunity in the country today to restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”

Those feedback place Pence firmly to the precise of the remainder of the 2024 presidential discipline and alone amongst GOP candidates, who largely declined to take a stance on the difficulty. And they drew alarms from obstetricians and medical doctors who specialise in high-risk pregnancies and say nonviable pregnancies are much more frequent than folks notice. They vary from ectopic pregnancies, when an embryo implants someplace apart from the uterus, to lethal beginning defects and different extreme being pregnant issues.

Banning abortions in these instances, medical doctors say, results in outcomes which might be each merciless and put girls’s lives and psychological well being in danger.

“One of the things that you cannot understate is the difficulty for a woman to carry a nonviable pregnancy,” mentioned Alan Peaceman, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It is psychological torture to go out in the world, for people to see your pregnancy - and people will come up to you and want to talk about your pregnancy. And that puts the woman in a terrible position that nobody should be in unless they chose to be in that position.”

Once a problem largely hidden from public view, nonviable pregnancies have gained consideration because the Supreme Court ended the constitutional proper to an abortion final yr, ushering in a wave of bans and restrictions in Republican-led states. Those strikes have implications not just for undesirable pregnancies but in addition for instances the place girls obtain heartbreaking diagnoses, typically after they’re months alongside into pregnancies that had been deeply desired.

In states like Texas, Florida and Louisiana, girls have described the anguish of being denied abortions even after they know their infants will likely be stillborn or die shortly after beginning. Some have needed to wait till they developed life-threatening infections for intervention. Others have spent 1000's of {dollars} to journey to states the place the process remains to be allowed.

Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology on the University of Washington Medical Center, mentioned she and her colleagues have seen a gradual stream of sufferers coming from states the place abortions at the moment are banned. About 11% of these sufferers, she mentioned, have acquired a severe prognosis, together with instances the place there isn't any likelihood of the fetus surviving.

“They are often absolutely shocked to learn that the abortion laws also prohibit them from being able to get care to be safe,” she mentioned, “even though they knew these laws were in place in this state.”

Spokespeople for former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declined to say whether or not they again Pence’s place. Trump, the early front-runner, has repeatedly mentioned he backs exceptions in instances of rape, incest and the lifetime of the mom and has blamed hard-line abortion stances for costing the social gathering in final yr’s midterm elections.

DeSantis, who's polling a distant second, signed a six-week ban in Florida that features an exception for deadly fetal abnormalities, together with rape, incest and to save lots of the mom’s life. He has declined to say whether or not he helps a federal ban.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s marketing campaign pointed to an article that didn't tackle the query of unviable pregnancies. A spokesman for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley mentioned solely that she “will sign pro-life legislation that includes exceptions for rape, incest, and for the life of the mother,” suggesting she, too, could also be against an exception for nonviable pregnancies - however declined to make clear.

Pence’s push to finish abortion places him at odds with nearly all of Americans who're broadly against the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal.

While most favor at the least some restrictions, a majority of U.S. adults say abortion must be authorized through the first weeks of being pregnant, even in states with the strictest limits, in response to a brand new ballot from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

But Pence, an evangelical Christian, for whom the difficulty is deeply private, argues limiting abortion is “more important than politics” and calls it the “cause of our time.”

As he works to enchantment to conservatives in states like Iowa, Pence additionally factors to the difficulty as one which distinguishes him from his GOP rivals, contrasting himself with “some people in this field now who want to relegate this issue to just a debate among the states.”

Pence does say he has “always supported” exceptions for rape, incest and to save lots of the lifetime of the mom, although he instructed an Indiana anti-abortion group in 2010 that he believed, “Abortion should never be legal,” and later that it ought to solely be authorized to save lots of the “life of the mother.”

There are quite a few fetal situations by which medical doctors usually agree there's “truly zero probability for a healthy outcome,” together with anencephaly, a extreme neural tube defect by which the cranium doesn’t type and the mind is uncovered, mentioned David Hackney, a spokesperson for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and a high-risk obstetrician within the Cleveland space.

“The chances of survival are absolute zero … no matter what Mike Pence says,” he mentioned. In such instances, he mentioned, “it feels absurd” for folks to be “forced against their will to carry pregnancies to term.”

But different instances are grayer. Take untimely rupture of membranes, when the water breaks early, typically within the second trimester, leaving a fetus with out the amniotic fluid that protects it and helps the event of organs, together with the lungs. In these instances, survival usually relies upon how early the rupture has occurred.

Hackney mentioned with early membrane rupture, “you do have rare survivors,” however that “exceedingly poor prognosis” comes with a litany of dangers, together with hemorrhaging, blood loss and harmful an infection, which might trigger everlasting infertility, shock and sepsis as girls wait to ship or qualify for abortions beneath “life of the mother” exceptions.

That’s what occurred to Savita Halappanavar, the 31-year-old girl who died in Ireland in 2012 of sepsis after she was denied an abortion, prompting the nation to overturn its longstanding ban.

Rachel Neal is a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB-GYN in Georgia, the place abortion is outlawed after cardiac exercise is detected, round six weeks. While the state supplies an exception in instances by which the “physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that the pregnancy is medically futile,” she mentioned water breaking within the late second trimester would usually not be lined.

That means girls who beforehand had the selection to finish their pregnancies early now both have to go away the the state or wait to ship a child that can doubtless die instantly or shortly after beginning, whereas placing themselves at excessive danger of an infection that might impression their skill to get pregnant once more.

“It’s completely uncharted territory,” Neal mentioned. “Before all of this, almost nobody chose this. … It was very uncommon that someone would choose to wait … because realistically any outcome that would result in a live birth is so slim.”

Nine states with abortion restrictions explicitly exempt instances of deadly fetal anomalies, in response to the Guttmacher Institute, a analysis group that helps abortion rights. Even in states with such exemptions, nevertheless, medical doctors say there could be confusion.

Some states have developed lists for what qualifies as a deadly fetal situation, however medical doctors say they are going to by no means totally seize each potential prognosis. And most states should not have such lists, leaving definitions up for interpretation.

“How lethal does it have to be?” Peaceman requested. “Does it have to die within the first few hours? Or the first 30 days?”

At the identical time, medical doctors in some states danger felony convictions that may carry 5 or 10 years of obligatory jail time if others dispute their interpretations of what some complain are overly broad and complicated guidelines.

Eric Scheidler, the chief director of the Pro-Life Action League, a nonprofit that advocates towards abortion, accused “politically motivated physicians” of specializing in “edge cases” to “maintain a broad abortion license” and in some instances “deliberately misunderstanding what the law says in order to create this narrative that we have to have complete abortion license or we’ll have physicians caught in a quandary.”

Nonetheless, he mentioned he thinks candidates ought to give attention to nearly all of abortions and never these sorts of instances.

“I really want to see these candidates talk about where we have areas of broad consensus,” he mentioned. “I would encourage political candidates to espouse positions that are widely held. … I don’t want to get hung up on these very rare cases.”

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