Read this if you believe that later abortions only happen in case of severe medical conditions
Timothy P. Carney
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It is a commonly held and oft-expressed opinion that abortions of babies after 20 weeks occur only when the unborn baby has been diagnosed with a fatal condition or a severe disability, or when continuing the pregnancy poses a severe threat to the mother’s life.
This view is not bolstered by the available evidence.
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Americans disagree vastly on the morality of abortion and when it should be legal, but we should be able to argue from a similar set of facts.
Many in the news media often use vague terminology, pointing out that many second- or third-trimester abortions happen because of a severe health problem for the baby or the mother, and thus implying that all late abortions are such cases. There is no evidence for this view. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that elective late-term abortions happen every day in the U.S.
It is nearly impossible to imagine a woman carrying a baby to term and then deciding in the sixth month to terminate a healthy child. Indeed, late-term abortions, even elective ones, surely tend to be in excruciating cases. But again, we shouldn’t let abortion defenders pretend that second- and third-trimester abortions are never elective.
Abortion data are very poor in the U.S. While the CDC operates an “Abortion Surveillance System,” it is totally voluntary, and it gets no data from California, Maryland, or New Hampshire.
The most thorough database of abortion in the U.S. is kept by the Guttmacher Institute, affiliated with Planned Parenthood. Guttmacher does not make its data open, meaning we get only the statistics Guttmacher wants to give.
But from the available evidence, all presented by defenders of abortion, it seems clear that many abortions after 20 weeks happen without any dire diagnoses for mom or baby.
Diana Greene Foster, a fierce defender of abortion, estimated in 2013 that “more than 15,000 [abortions] likely take place after 20 weeks.”
Foster and co-author Katrina Kimport published a paper titled “Who Seeks Abortions at or After 20 Weeks.”
They wrote in their paper, “data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (The authors later retracted this sentence after abortion opponents began citing it.)
Working together with abortion clinics, Foster and Kimport had, in an earlier study, recruited mothers who had obtained or sought abortions and repeatedly interviewed them over the course of five years.
The authors state that they “exclu[ded] women who sought later abortions on grounds of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” That means these researchers, contacting a small selection of abortion clinics, found hundreds of willing interviewees who had elective late-term abortions in a three-year period.
Foster and Kimport interviewed women who had abortions late in pregnancy.
One woman decided on an abortion at 24 weeks because she didn’t realize she was pregnant until week 22, and “she believed that having another child would compromise the care she could give her infant daughter.”
Writing about another woman, who aborted her child at 20 weeks, Foster and Kimport explained: “Her ex-boyfriend was not supportive of her continuing the pregnancy, and Amber knew she could not financially support another child. But she initially equivocated, unsure if she wanted an abortion. She eventually decided to have an abortion because, as she said, ‘I couldn’t afford another child. The dad didn’t want to be with me. Me and him weren’t going to be together, and he told me that I was going to have to raise the baby myself.’”
Again, these are very difficult circumstances, but it is not true that such late abortions happen only because of serious health issues with the baby or the mother. This entire study was based on elective late-term abortions.
In 2005, Guttmacher published a paper, “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions,” which found that one in five women having abortions after the first trimester cited any concern about fetal or health.
Warren Hern performs abortions as late as 35 weeks, according to Elaine Godfrey in the Atlantic. Godfrey spoke to some of his patients and to Hern himself about the reasons. Some of those abortions occurred after it became clear the baby could not survive. Others followed diagnoses that were less severe.
Read this passage from Godfrey’s piece about a heart-breaking diagnosis late in pregnancy: “‘I put my baby down,’ Kate Carson, who’d gotten an abortion at Hern’s clinic in 2012, told me. She’d been 35 weeks into a much-wanted pregnancy when her doctor diagnosed multiple brain anomalies. Carson’s daughter, the doctor said, would have trouble walking, talking, holding her head up, and swallowing. ‘It’s euthanasia. That’s the kind of killing this is,’ she said.”
Again, that’s an abortion in the 8th month of pregnancy and on a disabled but viable baby — one who could, judging by this report, grow up to walk and talk, but with difficulty.
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Asked what portion of third-trimester abortion patients are carrying a baby diagnosed with a fatal condition or facing severe disability? “In general, about half my patients on an average week have these conditions,” Hern said. “But we also have numerous patients who are victims of sexual assault, especially very young adolescents (12-13 y/o), and patients for whom the pregnancy is an immediate threat to the woman’s life, and this is true for my colleagues across the country. But there are no truly accurate national data for various reasons.”
The best case abortion defenders can honestly make is this: Many post-20-week abortions happen because of severe health problems for mother or child, and we don’t know how many. What they cannot honestly claim is that late-term abortion is always in response to such dire health concerns or diagnoses.