Patient Forward is a leading voice on later abortion, offering expert insight into policy and exposing the real-life harms of abortion bans on patients and families. Our team brings lived experience and policy expertise to shape public understanding.
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In the News
Check out our resource for journalists: Reporting on Abortion Later in Pregnancy
rePROs Fight Back
April 2025 to September 2025
Later Abortion Podcast Series
We co-produced a later abortion podcast series for the Policy Institute’s rePROs Fight Back podcast. In this six episode/six month series, host Jennie Wetter and her guests dive into the many intersections of later abortion — pregnancy criminalization, policy advocacy, and the power of storytelling.
MOTHER JONES
June 30, 2025
Pregnancy Justice’s legal director, Karen Thompson, warns: “We are in dangerous territory. This is our reality now.”
A new report by Pregnancy Justice and the advocacy group Patient Forward underscores the fact that one of the most insidious things about viability lines is their close relationship to fetal personhood, the once-fringe idea—now increasingly embraced by the Republican mainstream—that embryos and fetuses are entitled to the same constitutional rights as anyone else. Personhood arguments are foundational to the anti-abortion movement, part of its long-term strategy to outlaw all abortions. Reproductive rights groups should be doing everything they can to fight the spread of personhood laws, the report’s authors argue. Instead, Thompson says, by accepting viability limits, abortion advocates are unwittingly legitimizing the idea of fetal rights.
By Nina Martin
THE NATION
May 13, 2025
Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. But later-abortion care has never been more important.
“I had an abortion in the third trimester; I don’t expect every American to have the same understanding that I do,” Christensen, a cofounder of Patient Forward, said. “However, I do believe that I am in line with most Americans when we agree that we do not want the state to punish people for having them.”
By Amy Littlefield
THE CUT
March 20, 2025
Even the pro-choice state ballot measures that have passed in recent years can’t put a stop to these efforts, as many of them codified the right to abortion only up to viability, creating a loophole that conservative lawmakers are more than happy to exploit. “I live in the state of Missouri, and legislators here are not being sneaky at all. They have said very clearly that because there is a viability limit within Amendment 3, which passed in November — and viability is vague — they are now moving to define viability at conception. That’s fetal personhood,” says Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, chief external affairs officer at the advocacy organization Patient Forward. “It is a threat that we need to take seriously.”
By Andrea González-Ramírez
THE MISSOURI INDEPENDENT
January 27, 2025
By Bonyen Lee-Gilmore & Erika Christensen
“Wicked” shows us both the power and limitations of a political agenda rooted in familiarity. Real change demands strong values and clear-eyed vision from leaders who know some things must be limitless: our bodily autonomy, our power to consent, health and safety, our empathy.
WASHINGTON POST
September 25th, 2025
Readers respond to Kathleen Parker’s column on third-trimester abortions.
Most of the time when people are talking about abortion, they’re actually talking about abortion bans and squabbling over when they should go into effect. But we should start with whether the government should be empowered to step in and override medical judgment and patient autonomy at all. There’s no point in a pregnancy that the government is better positioned to make decisions about your health than you are. I believe that deep down, most people understand this.
LTE Comment by Erika Christensen
HUFFPOST
May 7th, 2024
There's an internal struggle playing out right now in many states where abortion rights will likely be on the November ballot.
Christensen, who now lives in Arizona, believes the stigma around later abortion care is at the root of these viability standards. “Modern later abortion care is safe, it’s ethical and, for the people who need it, it’s a miracle,” she said. Christensen and her husband founded the abortion strategy and advocacy group Patient Forward.
“I think it’s possible for the public to feel uncomfortable about something and want it to be available for them and their loved ones,” she said. “I hope that we stop writing policies based on discomfort and write policies based on health and safety.”
By Alanna Vagianos
THE GUARDIAN
January 21st, 2024
Abortion rights groups split with mainstream movement over support for former legal framework of ‘viability’
Framing restrictions as a political necessity reflected the movement’s internalized stigma around later abortion, said Erika Christensen, co-founder of Patient Forward, which works to ensure access throughout pregnancy. Christensen, who had to travel out of state in 2016 for a third-trimester abortion after discovering a fatal fetal anomaly, said the push for viability was an especially flawed strategy in red and purple states like Arizona, where she lives, because it leaves the door open for hostile legislatures to pass bans criminalizing abortion later in pregnancy. “The stakes are higher in the so-called ‘red’ states. It’s where so many people are suffering already,” she said. “Why are you codifying the circumstances of the suffering into our constitution?”
By Susan Rinkunas
SLATE
January 3rd, 2024
A ballot proposal out of Arkansas would be a huge deal in a state with a total abortion ban. But is endorsing it its own kind of defeat?
Erika Christensen of Patient Forward, a group that advocates for expansive abortion protections, said the idea that banning abortion at a specific week is reasonable “is willfully ignorant.”
She noted that abortion bans at any gestation are dangerous for pregnant people. She herself had to travel to Colorado in 2016 to get an abortion at 32 weeks due to a fetal diagnosis because New York had a criminal ban post-viability. Plus, abortion bans at specific weeks not only create stigma and harm people’s health, they allow the state to surveil and prosecute all pregnancy outcomes—not just abortion. (Look no further than an Ohio woman who was charged with abuse of a corpse after experiencing a stillbirth at home.) Christensen said the Arkansas proposal would “ensure the most under-resourced and over-policed members of their communities bear the brunt of their political cowardice.”
By Susan Rinkunas
TEEN VOGUE
December 28, 2023
“When the majority of later abortion seekers do not see themselves represented as those who ‘deserve’ the abortion they’re seeking, it is incredibly harmful,” Christensen tells Teen Vogue. “The rhetoric around later abortion is often so toxic, even from so-called ‘supporters’ who trip over themselves to say that ‘nobody is getting a later abortion for a healthy pregnancy’ as if a pregnancy absence consent could ever be ‘healthy.’”
By Danielle Campoamor