And when it comes to the restrictions on where and when women can terminate a pregnancy, they're often a vehicle for making abortion harder and harder to access. A lot of these laws are passed on the state level — requiring women to wait a certain amount of time, receive counseling, or get an ultrasound before getting the procedure — but conservatives in Congress still try to push through laws banning abortion at 20 weeks and as soon as a heartbeat can be detected (which can be as early as six weeks after conception , when most women don't know they're pregnant).