(LifeNews) --During the debate with pro-life Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last night, pro-abortion California Governor Gavin Newsom lied about late-term abortions.
While
decades worth of facts and figures show alate-term abortions are mostly
elective, mostly done on healthy moms and mostly done on healthy babies, Newsom
falsely claimed that they are only done for emergency reasons.
“On
the issue of the extreme exception that you highlight as it relates to the
issue of later term abortion, it’s almost always because of a fetal anomaly
[or] the life of the mother. And in those rare cases, I trust … the mother and
her doctor to make that decision,” he said.
DeSantis
said Newsom was “wrong” regarding late-term abortions and said data in Florida
indicated 88% of later abortions were elective.
He’s
right. Newsom’s claim is totally false for multiple reasons.
First,
a study from ANSIRH, a pro-abortion research group at the University of
California, contradicts the popular claim that most late-term abortions happen
because of serious health problems with the mother or her unborn baby.
“The
reasons people need third-trimester abortions are not so different from why
people need abortions before the third trimester…” the researchers wrote.
“[T]he circumstances that lead to someone needing a third-trimester abortion
have overlaps with the pathways to abortion at other gestations.”
According
to the study, women have third-trimester abortions for a number of
reasons, including difficulty obtaining an abortion, the inability to afford an
abortion earlier, failure to realize she was pregnant earlier, and medical
problems with the unborn baby. None of the abortions in the study were because
of medical problems with the mother, according to the report.
One
woman told researchers that she had a third-trimester abortion after her
ex-boyfriend got a bonus at work; she had not been able to afford one earlier.
Secondly,
health department data for all abortions confirms 96% of abortions are done for elective reasons,
not because of medical emergencies, rape, incest, etc.
Third,
late-term abortionist Martin Haskell, who is credited with inventing the
partial-birth abortion procedure, said in a 1993 interview with American Medical News:
“I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week
range…. In my particular case, probably 20 percent are for genetic reasons. And
the other 80 percent are purely elective.”
Fourth,
Ron Fitzsimmons, the former executive director of the National Coalition of
Abortion Providers, made a startling admission about late-term abortions as
well in 1997. He told the New York Times that he had lied to U.S. Congress when
he said late-term abortions are rare. Fitzsimmons said late-term abortions are
more common than abortion activists admit, and many are on healthy mothers
carrying healthy unborn babies.
Fifth,
in 2013, Diana Greene Foster, a well-known pro-abortion researcher at the University
of California San Francisco, wrote similarly that “data suggest
that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of
fetal anomaly or life endangerment. Indeed, we know very little about women who
seek later abortions.”
Sixth,
articles the Associated Press and New York Magazine have featured stories about women getting elective late-term abortions at
26 weeks and 28 weeks, respectively; both mothers were healthy and carrying
healthy babies.
Seventh,
abortion workers like pro-life leader Abby Johnson have shared evidence of this, too. Johnson
wrote in 2016 at the Independent Journal Review:
These [late-term]
abortions can be performed for the “life or health” of the mother. What this
means is that a late-term abortion can be provided for any reason, as long as
the abortionist checks a box on her chart stating it was affecting her “life or
health.” No documentation of proof is required.
According to several
former late term abortion clinic workers who have come through my organization
And Then There Were None, approximately 50% of 3rd trimester abortions are
performed on healthy babies. In my own personal experience, we often referred
women to late-term abortion providers who were pregnant with healthy babies,
but they wanted the abortion because they had either just broken up with the
baby’s father, lost their job, or something similar.
Most
countries across the world protect unborn babies from abortion after the first
trimester. The United States is one of the few countries in the world that
allows unborn babies to be aborted for any reason up to birth.
There
are few statistics about the number of late-term abortions on viable unborn
babies in the U.S. every year, but estimates put the number in the thousands.
Unborn babies are viable at about 21 weeks of pregnancy now, thanks to modern
medicine.
According
to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, 1.3 percent of
abortions in 2012 were done at 21 weeks of pregnancy or later. Considering
there are about 900,000 abortions a year currently in the U.S., a rough
estimate would put the number at approximately 11,700 late-term abortions
annually.
Abortion
activists often downplay late-term abortions, describing them as rare and
claiming they only occur when there are serious medical problems with the
mother or baby. The reason is that polls consistently show a strong majority of
Americans oppose late-term abortions once the baby is viable.
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