When Republicans unveiled their legislation to ban abortion nationwide at 15 weeks into pregnancy on Tuesday, they rolled it out using a familiar but deeply troubling phrase: late-term abortions.

As prevalent as the expression is, its a political construct thats meaningless in a medical sense, doctors and experts on reproductive rights have said for years and words matter when theyre being used to legislate around peoples bodies.

The phrase late-term abortion is a political buzzword, not medical terminology, Dr. Katie McHugh, an OB-GYN in Indiana and board chair with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told HuffPost.

Abortion bans based on gestational age are especially offensive because they are based only in ideology, not in medical science or common sense, she said.

Doctors only use the phrase late-term to refer to a pregnancy not an abortion 41 weeks after the last menstrual period, and abortion does not occur at that gestational age, McHugh explained. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists outlines it the same in its guide to abortion language, saying theres no clinical or medical significance to the term when applied to abortions.

A so-called late-term abortion, meanwhile, seems to be whatever the Republican writing the bill wants it to be. Tuesdays bill from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), titled the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act, says that cutoff is at 15 weeks. But another bill that Graham and other Republicans have repeatedly tried to pass in recent years held up 20 weeks as the late-term cutoff. The prominent anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, meanwhile, claims the phrase is appropriate for abortions performed starting at 13 weeks of pregnancy.