Sponsors (43)
Official title: To amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit abortion in cases where a fetal heartbeat is detectable.
Introduced January 23, 2025 by Mike Kelly · Last progress January 23, 2025
The bill aims to tightly regulate abortion practices—preserving a narrow life‑saving exception and protecting pregnant women from prosecution—while imposing criminal liability, reporting, documentation, and facility restrictions that are likely to reduce provider availability, limit telehealth and medication abortion options, raise privacy risks, and create delays especially for minors, rape survivors, and people in rural areas.
Pregnant women are explicitly protected from federal criminal prosecution under this section and related conspiracy/complicity provisions.
Physicians are allowed to perform abortions when necessary to save a woman's life under a narrowly defined life‑saving exception based on reasonable medical judgment.
Mandated fetal‑heartbeat checks and notifications must be documented, which could improve medical record completeness and continuity of care.
Physicians who perform abortions without the mandated heartbeat check or notification face federal criminal liability, likely reducing abortion provider availability and access.
Defining 'perform' to include prescribing criminalizes prescription and chemical abortions, which could severely restrict telehealth provision of medication abortion and pharmacy access.
Prohibiting counseling or medical treatment at abortion‑performing facilities (unless hospitals) will fragment care, increase travel/time costs, reduce available providers, and disproportionately harm rural patients.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Criminalizes physician‑performed abortions after a detectable fetal heartbeat unless narrow, documented exceptions apply, and requires heartbeat determination, notification, and recordkeeping.
Makes it a federal crime for a physician to perform an abortion after determining a detectable fetal heartbeat or to perform an abortion without first determining and informing the patient whether a detectable heartbeat exists, subject to narrow exceptions. Requires documentation of heartbeat determinations and notifications in the patient medical record, creates limited exceptions (life‑saving care, certain rape/rape-of-minor exceptions with conditions), and protects the pregnant woman from criminal liability under this new rule.