Third-trimester abortions are much more common than ‘assault-rifle’ deaths
Timothy P. Carney
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Defenders of legal abortion, in politics and the news media, do not like talking about third-trimester abortions. That’s natural because, as everyone who has had a baby knows, in the third trimester of pregnancy, the not-yet-born baby looks just like a baby, acts like a baby, and is viable outside the womb.
For that reason, abortion defenders don’t like admitting that Roe v. Wade established, in effect, a constitutional right to abortion in the third trimester — as long as the abortionist said the abortion was needed for the mother’s health, which late-term abortionists will say about any pregnancy.
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Out of this discomfort about third-trimester abortions, Democrats insist that nobody supports allowing abortion up until birth. However, when asked if they believe that abortion should ever be illegal at any stage in pregnancy, they will say no.
The most common technique for trying to make the issue of third-trimester abortion go away is to claim falsely that it is super rare. When late-term abortion came up in the GOP debate Wednesday night, liberal journalist Katie Couric resorted to this assertion.
That makes it sound like there are almost no third-trimester abortions, doesn’t it?
But there are many, many, thousands of third-trimester abortions every year in the United States.
The Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, said it has documented over 930,000 abortions per year in recent years. If we take Couric’s “1%” as fact, then about 9,300 third-trimester babies are aborted per year in the U.S.
That’s a lot of babies, and that’s a low-ball estimate.
For reference, the high-end estimate of gun murders in the U.S. is about 20,000, or twice the number of late-term abortions. FBI numbers suggest that about 2.7% of all gun homicides are committed with rifles, which includes the guns the media call “assault rifles.” That suggests about 541 people are murdered with rifles in the U.S.
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Couric produced a (deeply misleading) documentary about guns and started lobbying for an “assault-weapon ban.” I don’t think she would say that assault-weapon deaths are very rare, yet there are as many third-trimester abortions in a weekend as there are assault-weapon killings in a month.
So no, third-trimester abortions aren’t rare. The question is whether Couric or Democrats can morally defend them.