The Truth About Late-Term Abortions that Abortion Activists Routinely Ignore

As the Senate looks set to confirm judge Amy Coney Barrett later this afternoon, there’s a lot of stories arguing that her inclusion on the bench will result in fewer women being able to access late-term abortions for medical reasons. This is wrong, on a variety of levels.

Generally, most of the public considers late-term abortions as those completed in the late-second and third trimesters. About 1.2% of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Abortion Surveillance.

Unfortunately, the CDC does not track the reason for these abortions, but it’s likely that most happen for the sake of convenience and some due to prenatal diagnoses. The pro-abortion lobby likes to argue that all late-term abortions are because of the preborn baby’s health or disability. For example, an entirely livable condition like Down syndrome.

Recently, Elle Magazine released an article entitled, “I had an abortion to save my son’s life.” The mother explained that her twins developed Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS), which only happens to identical twins and means that one healthy baby is getting all of the blood supply and it’s possible that due to the shared placenta and without some sort of intervention, both twins may die.

It’s a catastrophic condition, and there are no easy answers. The mother in the article says that she made the decision to stop the heart of one baby in order to save another.

The woman says in the article, “Abortion opponents would tell you this is rare, that most second and third trimester abortions have nothing in common with mine. I will tell you differently, that I had a medical procedure in the midst of a devastating medical tragedy, and that every abortion is a medical procedure.”

However, the pro-life possibilities aren’t explored, nor really acknowledged.

Was it possible that there was another option that didn’t require the killing of one of the preborn babies? Could it have been possible to let nature take its course while preserving the life of the stronger baby? Possibly, but the point of the article is to advocate that if abortion is restricted somehow this will tie up medical options.

It won’t. Instead, it will force certain pro-abortion physicians to explore other options and perhaps learn more about how to extend and preserve life wherever possible, rather than relying on abortion and death as a treatment.

USA Today has a similar article entitled, “I had an abortion after a fatal fetal diagnosis. Amy Barrett could take that choice away.” It again argues that somehow any abortion restriction will infringe on medical treatment or addressing of a prenatal diagnosis.

The woman in this article shares how she was given a likely fatal preborn diagnosis, and decided on abortion, though the article is vague on what actually happened. Was the preborn baby aborted, or was she induced and delivered early to a living child? It’s a critical distinction.

A late-term abortion usually does require the woman to give birth, but the preborn baby has been killed in the womb through an injection of poison like digitoxin. However, there have been a couple of instances where a woman has been induced to give birth to a child early with a fatal complication, due to a health issue with the mother or the preborn, and the child dies soon after birth and some people consider? that an abortion.

But in that situation, it’s not an abortion.

The child is born alive and though their health is compromised, and death may come soon after birth, the child was not deliberately killed.

Colorado currently has Proposition 115 on the ballot, which will ban abortions after the 22nd week of pregnancy with exceptions for the immediate health of the mother. As that is about the lowest point of viability, it’s entirely possible that a child born in an emergency c-section in the event of a health emergency at 22 weeks would survive.

Opponents of the bill also state that a woman would have to go through the “emotional and financial toll on top of the physical risks of labor and pregnancy” if she did not get an abortion after a prenatal diagnosis. The argument is misleading.

A woman in a late-term abortion will go through labor and delivery, on top of that she may have to pay the outrageous $10,000 outright and travel expenses for a procedure that’s not covered by insurance, for an abortion at the clinic of Dr. Warren Hern in Boulder, Colorado. But instead of getting a few minutes or perhaps hours with her child after birth, advocating for an abortion would mean that the baby she gives birth to is likely dead (the process is not 100% effective). If the abortion process is not perfect, which often happens, she may even give birth on the toilet at home or in a hotel before the days-long late-term abortion process is complete.

In reality, what would be more traumatizing, a dead baby in a toilet or a baby born alive who gets to spend precious minutes and/or hours with family and friends?

The answer is fairly simple. But abortion activists don’t tell women this, they argue that abortion is somehow safer, more humane than giving life a chance.

Photo from Shutterstock

 

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