Even after five decades of argument about abortion in the United States, the most contentious question newly at the forefront is a very basic one: What is abortion?

Major medical societies, and medical billing codes, define abortion as any procedure that terminates a pregnancy – whether that pregnancy is wanted or unwanted, whether a woman is seeking the procedure to clean out her uterus after a miscarriage, or because of a dire fetal diagnosis, or to terminate a pregnancy that she had not expected.