The latest action on abortion legislation across the states

Kentucky stopped providing abortions for a week in mid-April after Republican lawmakers passed a sweeping package of restrictions that included a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Less than 24 hours later, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed another 15-week ban, calling the restrictions “the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation.” And by the end of the month, lawmakers in Oklahoma had passed a six-week ban that will halt most abortions in the state as soon as it’s signed into law.

While a lot of the bills this year look similar to bills we’ve seen before, the stakes are completely different. In recent years, the most restrictive bans were blocked by the courts, ruled unconstitutional because they violated Supreme Court precedent established in Roe v. Wade, which has protected the constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years.

[What abortion laws would look like if Roe v. Wade were overturned]

But nine months after the Texas ban took effect, as the Supreme Court considers a case that could overturn or significantly weaken Roe, antiabortion legislators across the country are newly energized, passing bills that could reshape the abortion landscape in the United States by the end of the summer.

As Republican-led states move to restrict abortion and Democratic-dominated states move to protect access to the procedure, here are the types of legislation we are tracking most closely:

Lawmakers in several GOP-led states have been pushing bills that mirror Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, the law at the heart of the case pending before the Supreme Court, hoping to maximize the chance that their legislation can take effect after the high court rules this summer.

[Chief Justice Roberts said Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban was ‘the standard’ around the world. The reality is more complicated.]

Republicans have described these bans as a sensible “compromise,” compared to the more restrictive six-week ban in Texas. But a 15-week ban still represents a dramatic rollback of the standard established by Roe, which protects the right to abortion until a fetus is viable outside the womb, around 24 weeks.

Antiabortion lawmakers across the country saw a major opportunity in Texas’s restrictive six-week ban, which empowers private citizens to enforce the law through civil litigation. Using this novel legal strategy, Texas lawmakers figured out a way to bypass the courts, which have halted a dozen similar bans in the past. Almost immediately after the Texas law took effect, Republican lawmakers in other states began expressing their intentions to try the same strategy.

[Texas’s strict new abortion law has eluded multiple court challenges. Abortion rights advocates think they have a new path to get it blocked.]

Nine months later, more than a dozen states have proposed their own versions of the Texas abortion ban. Most of these laws ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people know they’re pregnant, and all utilize the Texas law’s enforcement mechanism.

One important thing to note: These laws could start to take effect long before the Supreme Court rules this summer.

Even before this year’s legislative sessions, 12 states already had “trigger laws” on the books. These are complete bans on abortion, at any point in pregnancy, that “trigger” as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned.

[Twelve states have abortion ‘trigger laws.’ What are they?]

One particularly significant version of this law passed the legislature in Oklahoma, which already has a trigger ban. Legislators there decided to revise that existing trigger law so that, even if Roe is not completely overturned, a full abortion ban will still take effect.

Medication abortion — an abortion method that involves taking two pills, mifepristone and misoprostol — now accounts for more than 50 percent of abortions performed in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration lifted key restrictions on abortion pills in December, allowing abortion providers to send pills through the mail in states that do not already outlaw telemedicine for abortion care, a move that has prompted Republican lawmakers to crack down further on medication abortions.

Republican lawmakers in several states have introduced bills that would ban medication abortions entirely, while many more are pushing measures that would mandate in-person visits for abortion pills. Other GOP legislators have proposed bills that would compel abortion clinics to provide medically inaccurate information on “abortion reversal” when administering abortion pills, informing patients that they can reverse their abortions if they change their minds after taking the first pill, a regimen that has been widely denounced by leading medical associations.

With Roe in jeopardy, many Democratic-led states are moving to pass laws that protect the right to abortion within their borders. While most of these states are trying to codify Roe in state statute, several are moving to enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions.

[What questions do you have about abortion legislation in the U.S.? Ask The Post.]

Other states are trying to create abortion “sanctuaries” inside their borders, working to pass laws that will make it easier for people to travel to their clinics from antiabortion states.