That chance alone, however, doesn’t explain this new trend. Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, which researches abortion, noted that the recent cluster of heartbeat bills is also “a reflection of the fact that these states have done everything but ban abortion.” Kentucky lawmakers, for instance, have already passed laws that heavily restrict private insurance coverage of abortion, ban insurance coverage of the procedure for public employees, require a 24-hour waiting period before getting an abortion and mandate parental consent for minors. The state also has just one abortion clinic.

For an anti-abortion lawmaker who wants to signal to his base that he remains committed to the cause, there’s little left to do but to try to outlaw the procedure.

It was not hyperbole for the American Civil Liberties Union to declare on Friday that “Kentucky just banned abortion.” These are effectively full abortion bans. For one thing, many women don’t realize they’re pregnant before six weeks of pregnancy, which is about two weeks after a missed menstrual period. But even the “best case” scenario is difficult to imagine: A woman who has very regular menstrual cycles and notices right away that she’s late would have less than two weeks to purchase and take a pregnancy test, decide that she wants an abortion, schedule one and pull together money for travel costs, child care and the procedure itself.

Things would get even more Kafkaesque in states with few clinics and mandatory counseling and waiting periods. Take Missouri, where a heartbeat bill passed the state House last month. If that bill were to be enacted, a woman hoping to have an abortion in Missouri would have to travel to the state’s lone abortion clinic for state-mandated counseling — during which she would be discouraged from terminating. Then she would have to wait 72 hours before making a second trip to the clinic to get the procedure.

Some physicians won’t even perform abortions before around six weeks of pregnancy; an embryo at that stage is so small that it might not be visible on an ultrasound, which is used to ensure that a pregnancy is not ectopic, or growing outside the uterus.