Last Tuesday night, as I watched the Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I was struck by how both Harris and the moderators downplayed Trump’s claim that Democrats want abortion to be legal in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months of pregnancy. When asked about limits on legal abortion, Harris said she supported “Roe [v. Wade].” If you were unfamiliar with the details of Roe v. Wade, you might have assumed she was saying it prohibited late-term abortions. But it didn’t.
Roe said that in the first two trimesters (up to when the fetus is twenty-two weeks old), states could not outlaw abortion. Roe also did not require states to ban abortion in the third trimester. They could keep it legal if they wanted. But if they did ban it in the third trimester, they had to allow an exception for abortions to protect a woman’s health.
The problem with this exception is that Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, said that “health” included any factor that was “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, [or related to] the woman’s age.”
Last year one million abortions occurred in the United States, according to the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher institute. And 1% of them happen after the child is 20 weeks old. That means 10,000 children are killed in late-term abortions every year. That’s close to the number of people killed by guns in this country every year. If that’s a big problem, then surely late-term abortion—not even abortion in general, just late-term abortion—must also be a big problem.
But to act like late-term abortion doesn’t happen is an obviously disprovable lie. Trump said, “You can do abortions in the seventh month . . .” to which Harris said, “That’s not true.” But you can find places online like the Dupont clinic in DC that offers abortion from 25-31 weeks and Warren Hern’s in Colorado that offers second- and third-trimester abortions. Remember, Roe said states could ban abortions in the third trimester, but they didn’t have to; and if they did, they had to leave a meaningless health exception.
Now, some people will say that late-term abortions are only for exceptionally rare cases like when a woman’s life is in danger or when there are severe fetal handicaps. But you don’t do a late-term abortion after twenty weeks, because that takes longer than an emergency c-section; and with a c-section, the child at least has a chance to live. Furthermore, we don’t kill two-year-olds who are dying from a disability, and since the unborn are equally human we shouldn’t kill them for the same reason.
But it’s also simply not true that late-term abortions are obtained just for those reasons. Martin Haskell, a late-term abortion provider, testified before Congress saying: “I’ll be quite frank. Most of my abortions are elective in that twenty- to twenty-four-week range. . . . In my particular case, probably twenty percent are for genetic reasons. And the other eighty percent are purely elective.”
A 2013 study said the most common reasons women delayed abortion past twenty weeks included things like the inability to raise funds for the procedure or failing to recognize they were pregnant. It said, “Most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment”
And let’s be clear about what happens in these procedures. The Supreme Court said in Gonzales v. Carhart of late-term abortions that the abortionist may “kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation. They inject digoxin or potassium chloride into the fetus, the umbilical cord, or the amniotic fluid. Fetal demise may cause contractions and make greater dilation possible. Once dead, moreover, the fetus’s body will soften, and its removal will be easier.” Warren Hern says in his medical textbook Abortion Practice: “A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus” (142).
The facts are clear. Late-term abortion is not a myth. It is murder, and anyone who is simply a decent human being should oppose this evil.