This is horrifically unfair. It’s inhumane, and a ban on abortion in all but name. I think this needs explaining from a medical point of view. Because it’s even more horrific than it sounds:
We start counting the menstrual cycle from the first day of a period, because that’s an easy day to pinpoint. Therefore the first week of your pregnancy is actually when your last period started, and aren’t pregnant at all.
Following this, anotehr week passes before you ovulate- we generally say day 14 as being the time people ovulate, though people can get pregnant on a range of days. So around two weeks of the pregnancy technically take place before the fertilisation has even occurred.
After that, we generally advise people to wait for a couple of weeks after sex before they check whether they may be pregnant, and it’s not generally recommended to test less than 8 days after ovulation because you’re likely to get a false negative reading; it’s usually too early to tell before then. Technically, many sources advise people to wait at least until their period is late, and some even advise waiting a week after, if you can. So this means that it’ll be around 4 or 5 weeks into your pregnancy, at the earliest, when you’d be able to test. This is part of the reason we tend to recommend testing more than once - testing too early might suggest you aren’t pregnant, because the levels of bHCG just aren’t high enough, yet, and lots of factors can influence whether the test is falsely negative early on in a pregnancy.
There are tests that let you check maybe 5 or so days before your missed period, but the earlier you check, the more likely you are to get a false negative, because it takes time for the bHCG (the chemical that pregnancy tests look for) to be secreted by an implanting embryo. And of course, not everyone is sitting there waiting for a pregnancy; there are lots of reasons that people might only think to test for pregnancy after their period is delayed; perhaps they relied on contraception which failed, for example. Taking multiple pregnancy tests 3-4 weeks after every time you have sex in your fertile window, just so you could find out if you are pregnant ASAP would be pretty expensive and time consuming; no laws should force people to have to live on edge like this.
And also, it’s not uncommon to experience a chemical pregnancy with an embryo that doesn’t fully implant and miscarries around the time you’d expect your period, or a week or two after that. Testing ever earlier doesn’t change the fact that a lot of early pregnancies (or fertilised embryos) miscarry really early on, therefore testing very early is potentially distressing because it raises people’s hopes when they otherwise would have just had a slightly ‘late’ period. I used to find it heartbreaking on my gynae job when couples would come in with a ‘bleed 4 weeks into pregnancy’, dealing with what was for them a very real loss of a much hoped for child. It’s another of the reasons we recommend testing more than once. Forcing people to test early in order to find out ASAP could cause so many people unnecessary distress.
This all also assumes that everyone follows a 28 day cycle. News flash: people’s bodies don’t read textbooks. For example, I have a pretty irregular cycle, and I can easily be multiple weeks early or late without having been pregnant. Most cycles might not be as messed up as mine (that’d be the stress, probably), but the point still stands that people might have very real reasons for not fussing until their period is really rather late. I could easily go 6 weeks into a theoretical pregnancy without having any clue I was pregnant, and I’m sure that could happen to lots of people.
Lastly, and most importantly, people need time to process information, make an informed choice and make arrangements if they believe an abortion is the best choice for them. Even if someone knows they are pregnant at 4 weeks, a limit at 6 weeks does not give a lot of time to make arrangements, and is entirely arbitrarily set without any reference to embryology. There’s no reason for the limit to be set at 6 weeks; foetuses of 7 weeks, or even 17 weeks aren’t able to live on their own and are still nowhere near the limit of viability.
annaxmalina
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2087
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
