Pro-abortion Democrats have long since slid right past President Clinton’s1992 insincere but effective pronouncement that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Today’s Democratic party now treats this as a concession that would place limitations—any limitation–on what ought to be a woman’s unbridled right to “terminate her pregnancy” up until birth.
Let’s talk about a post this morning written by veteran reporter Julie Rovner, currently Chief Washington Correspondent for Kaiser Health News. It’s headlined “Abortion ‘until the day of birth’ is almost never a thing.” As you see, tearing apart of a huge unborn baby “is almost never a thing”—it virtually never happens [].
Let’s start with a statement that comes about 2/3rd of the way into her analysis. Rovner employs a ruse to define “late-term” out of existence.
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, late-term refers to the period after 40 weeks, when the pregnancy has exceeded full-term. The Associated Press in 2022 changed its stylebook to read: “Do not use the term ‘late-term abortion.’”)
It’s true. The Associated Press happily decided to just blindly follow the ACOG recommendation:
“Do not use the term ‘late-term abortion,’” the AP intoned. “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines late term as 41 weeks through 41 weeks and 6 days of gestation, and abortion does not happen in this period.”
Think about that. The last week of a pregnancy is the ONLY time you can use “late-term abortion,” and, come to think of it, since “abortion does not happen in this period,” voila, no late-term abortion, right?
Having won the approval of the Medical Establishment to pretend “late-term abortions” don’t exist, Rovner writes “Abortions after 21 weeks are rare and usually the result of tragedy. Republicans want voters to think otherwise.” PS “There are only three providers publicly known to offer abortion after 28 weeks,” Kimport said. To the best of my knowledge, that is true.
Laura Echevarria, NRL’s Director of Communications and Press Secretary, succinctly dismantled this and many other ploys in the November issue of National Right to Life News.
As Echevarria writes
Abortions late in pregnancy are not reported in many states and the number of such abortions is not fully known. What is known comes from public statements made by abortionists—including how many they have done and for what reasons.
Only a handful of abortionists in the United States perform late abortions. One of them, Warren Hern of Colorado, was recently profiled in The Atlantic (May 2023):
He specializes in abortions late in pregnancy—the rarest, and most controversial, form of abortion. This means that Hern ends the pregnancies of women who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along.
In The Atlantic interview, it is noted that, “Hern is reluctant to acknowledge any limit, any red line. He takes the woman’s-choice argument to its logical conclusion…”
Rovner trots out her trump card, Katrina Kimport, a medical sociologist and professor at the University of California at San Francisco, who has interviewed “more than 50 women who terminated pregnancies after 24 weeks.”
There is nothing new in Prof. Kimport’s report, certainly nothing that challenges the number of late-term abortions which Rovner dismisses as “vanishingly small.
John McCormack of National Review, put this “vanishingly small” number in context:
NBC’s Dasha Burns pointed to the fact that 1.3 percent of abortions happen at 21 weeks or later, but 1.3 percent of 930,000 total abortions still equals 12,000 unique human beings killed each year at 21 weeks or later, when babies are capable of feeling pain and sometimes capable of surviving outside of the womb. There are fewer than 12,000 total gun homicides in the United States each year. Burns, in an attempt to minimize the horror of late-term abortion, actually ended up agreeing that late-term abortions do in fact happen in the United States.
Legislatively, we must remember that every Democrat but one in the Senate and one in the House back the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA). As a National Review editorial noted: “When Democrats in Washington speak of ‘codifying Roe,’ what they mean in plain English is protecting a right to kill a baby through all nine months for virtually any reason.”
To wrap it up, The Atlantic profile of Hern written by staffer Elaine Godfrey is headlined tellingly” The Abortion Absolutist.” Commenting on The Atlantic profile, Peter Laffin of the Washington Examiner writes
Hern admitted that at least half of the late-term abortions he’s performed over the past half-century were elective, meaning that there was no underlying medical condition in the baby or the mother. Abortion advocates regularly assure the public that late-term abortions of this sort are exceedingly rare, if existent at all. But here we have it from the horse’s mouth. Who knows how many thousands of these abortions Hern has performed? Again, he’s been doing this for half a century.
It gets worse. If you have the stomach for it, you can read it here.
The defenses for abortion on demand up until birth are god-awful in their own right on those few occasions where pro-abortionists concede they exist. But for Democrats and their limitless supply of obliging reporters to attempt to shift the onus to pro-lifers is a stark reminder of just what we are up against.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.