Last week, concern troll-cum-New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece scolding Democrats in the Senate for blocking a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, or what he deemed "late-term abortions." Brooks claimed that Democratic donors "want to preserve a woman’s right to choose through all nine months of her pregnancy." If he had consulted Wikipedia (or a calculator), he might have learned that in fact 20 weeks is only halfway through a pregnancy.

But while Brooks was using the paper of record to deliver confused medical information and bad arithmetic, legislators in Mississippi were busy passing a bill through the state house that would ban abortions after 15 weeks — setting a limit two full months short of what the Supreme Court determined, in Roe v. Wade, was an acceptable cut-off time.

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Many states have passed similar bills banning abortions after 20 weeks, citing junk-science claims that fetuses can feel pain at that stage. (Legitimate scientists say the earliest point for that possibility is around 29 weeks.) Mississippi legislators dispensed with those phony rationalizations, instead shifting to two basic but contradictory arguments: They need to protect women from these abortions and they need to punish women for waiting too long.

“At that time, it’s time to decide whether you’re going to carry that child or not," argued state Rep. Becky Currie, a Republican.

"Women deserve real health care, not some fake health care that involves the destruction of human life and a woman's health," said state Rep. Andy Gipson, another Republican.

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Nearly 95 percent of abortions occur before 15 weeks, but women's health care experts argue that abortions after 15 weeks are not only safe but necessary — and it's not because women are too stupid or lazy to get the procedure earlier in their pregnancy.

“Some women really do not know that they are pregnant" until 15 weeks or more of gestation, said Dr. Aisha Wagner, a California practitioner who works with Physicians for Reproductive Health. "I have seen this time and time again, and it’s for many different reasons," Wagner told Salon, noting that stress, work, child care and bodily differences can lead to women not becoming aware of a pregnancy.

"Every pregnancy decision is personal, and women must weigh a variety of factors in making that decision," Ushma Upadhyay, a researcher for Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, explained.

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“So many women might take time to make their decision," she added, noting that sometimes women's circumstances change during a pregnancy, leading to a decision to terminate.

One irony at work here is that anti-choice activists have long argued that women make the choice to have an abortion rashly and need more time to think it over, a justification used to pass mandatory waiting period laws in many states. Now those same anti-choice legislators are trying to punish women who do take extra time to think it over.

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(In fact, evidence shows by the time women come in for abortions, they have thought the question over and do not need waiting periods or strict gestational limits to manage their decision-making process.)

As for the claim that abortions need to be cut off at 15 weeks to protect women, Dr. Wagner said, "We have plenty of evidence showing that this is a very safe procedure."

Not only is abortion "much safer than childbirth" for a woman's body, Upadhyay argued, but research from her organization, published in JAMA Psychiatry, shows that there is simply no link between abortion and mental health problems. (The anti-abortion movement has long claimed such a connection.)

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If legislators have legitimate concern for women's well-being, Upadhyay noted, they might want to ensure that abortion services are available. "When women have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term," she said, "there are some detrimental socioeconomic costs."

For instance, the research team at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health found that women who wanted but failed to get an abortion were three times as likely to be unemployed and four times as likely to be living in poverty as women who successfully sought out the procedure. Mississippi already has the highest poverty rate in the nation, but legislators there seem to be looking for innovative ways to make it worse.

Miranda Blue, the research director for People for the American Way, said the Mississippi bill may represent "a major strategic shift for the anti-choice movement."

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"For a lot of years, the more mainstream anti-choice groups have been shying away from clearly unconstitutional broadsides at Roe," she said. Americans United for Life spent years promoting model state legislation meant to bury abortion clinics under medically unnecessary red tape. Such laws were meant as a backdoor method of limiting abortion access without directly trying to overturn Roe v. Wade.

That strategy failed in 2016, however, when the Supreme Court struck down one of the bills that Americans United for Life planted in the Texas legislature. Now, Blue said, anti-choice activists may be "banking on Trump putting in another Supreme Court justice who will give the anti-choice movement what it wants." That would explain why Mississippi is considering such a blunt challenge to the gestational limits set forward by Roe v. Wade.

Blue's colleague, researcher Peter Montgomery, collected evidence for this theory at this year's Evangelicals for Life meeting. He recorded a panel on Jan. 20 where lawyers for Alliance Defending Freedom — the right-wing group that has backed legal challenges to insurance coverage for birth control and wedding cakes for same-sex marriages — seemingly took credit for the idea of 15-week bans.

“We have a strategic plan that is a comprehensive start-to-finish, from when we’re considering legislation all the way up to the Supreme Court, to challenge Roe," Denise Burke, who worked for Americans United for Life before joining Alliance Defending Freedom, told the audience. “So we’re not looking at regulation. We’re actually looking to enact abortion bans."

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Burke went on to say that her group had cherry-picked certain states for these abortion bans: "We have very carefully targeted states based on where we think the courts are the best, where we think the governors and the [attorneys general] and the legislatures are going to do the best job at defending these laws.”

When asked to explain Burke's comments, Bob Trent, a spokesman for Alliance Defending Freedom, replied, "From time to time, lawmakers ask ADF attorneys to review the constitutionality of proposed legislation."

If the 15-week ban survives in court, Burke told the panel, there's a next step: "We’re going to go for a complete ban on abortion except to save the life of the mother." Acknowledging that even in that circumstance some women might seek safe abortions by obtaining abortion medication, she added that her group was also "looking into solutions for that."