How late can abortions be performed in the US? A few facts:
- There are only seven states where abortion is legal in the third trimester.
- There are only 14 clinics in those states that perform abortions in the third trimester. They are expensive and time consuming.
- Based on extrapolations of CDC surveillance data, there are probably only about 1,000 third-trimester abortions performed each year. The vast majority of these are between 24-28 weeks.
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- There are no records for the number of abortions performed in the last two months of pregnancy, but it's almost certainly close to zero and exclusively done in cases of severe fetal abnormality or danger to the mother.
- Needless to say, no abortions are performed after birth anywhere in the country.
Now you know.
in other news, water is wet. The sky is blue. Donald Trump lies like a rug.
For a long time I believed that late-term abortions were the most obviously morally problematic. But after much thought I have now flip-flopped: I now believe late abortions are the *least* morally objectionable. Think about it - who would carry a pregnancy for more than six months and then decide they need an abortion? There are three main groups:
1) People who want a child and were glad when they found they were pregnant, but are now seeking an abortion after getting terrible news at a pre-natal checkup;
2) 13-year-old rape victims who are in denial because they are traumatized;
3) Poor women who wanted to abort as soon as they learned they were pregnant, knowing they can't afford to raise a child, but they waited until late because it took that long to save the money. Some of these women never do manage to pay for an abortion and have a baby by default. Learn more about this group by googling "intergenerational welfare dependency".
Aren't 24 weeks still 2nd trimester? Human pregnancies are counted as 40 weeks long, so they usually don't start counting the 3rd trimester until at least 26 weeks. Most of these abortions are late 2nd trimester, not 3rd trimester.
His graph makes clear that abortions in the 27th week and later are third trimester abortions.
Are there actually any abortions at all of a viable fetus after 24-26 weeks? I don't think so. That's after viability (using a bunch of modern technology particularly if it's under 30 weeks). Removing a fetus that's dead or isn't anything like a potentially functioning human is another thing.
In the olden days no one knew what was happening until birth. Now we do. And I think anti-abortion people have no idea and/or in denial about how wrong things can go for the mother or the developing fetus. Or how often country doctors or midwives took a look at what was birthed and quietly did something about it.
Anyone have any actual knowledge about any of this or a link?
And I think anti-abortion people have no idea and/or in denial about how wrong things can go for the mother or the developing fetus. Or how often country doctors or midwives took a look at what was birthed and quietly did something about it.
This is super obvious when you listen to them talk, especially after a high profile news story about someone bleeding out on the ER floor. “I never meant for the leopard to eat that nice girl’s face, just the faces of the sluts,” they sob (if they don’t deny reality completely when these things inevitably happen in their local ER).
Anti-abortionists always try to conflate abortions with infanticide.
Kermit Gosnell did that kind of abortion. He pled guilty for a life sentence to avoid the death penalty.
You cant just walk in at 34 weeks pregnant and demand an abortion. There needs to be a reason, usually a medical reason for doing one. If you have a health fetus and no reason to expect a bad delivery we just wait for a delivery. Killing the baby after delivery is murder which no one does unless they are a murderer. There is already a law against that.
Steve
There has to be more than a medical reason for it. There has to be a substantial, nearly life threatening medical reason for that. They don't hand those out like candy.
Not saying Dave_MB32 and Steve are wrong, but how do you know this to be true? Is it what you think should be true? What you want to believe is the case? Or is it what you know from a reliable source?
I can tell you that I escort at clinics in the Chicago area, and I've never seen a visibly pregnant patient there. From that, I'd guess that late term abortions are rare. But I don't know what laws, rules, or policies limit them. It may well be up to the patients and doctors. To my mind, that's what it should be...and that's different from what you both said.
I have no idea why Kevin insists on putting numbers to things that just aren’t going to be decided based on the numbers. The anti-abortionists believe abortion is evil and/or want to control women. Neither of those two desires can be expressed numerically. (“I’ll settle for a reduction of 90% of evil in the world and controlling just 70% of a woman’s body” aren’t ever going to come out of anybody’s mouth ever.)
But the target for this data/chart is not the hard core anti-abortionist movement types, its the soft anti's who probably get most of their information from right wing sources that obscure/ignore these facts. I think its helpful to keep putting these sorts of facts out there to move the debate and the vote balances on the issue.
"Needless to say, no abortions are performed after birth anywhere in the country."
Actually young children are routinely aborted by AR-15-weilding maniacs with distressing regularity in this country. According to JD Vance, it's just "a fact of life".
Its a nice chart, and I am not throwing rocks at it.
But.........I think it was blindingly obvious that the anti abortion people believe life begins AT CONCEPTION. They f-ing say it all the time. For them, this chart is pointless, worthless, and evil.
It was also blindingly obvious in 2016 that if Clinton didn't win the anti abortion people were going to pack the Supreme Court. They f-ing said they were going to do exactly that, and they did.
Now, I guess, it is finally obvious enough that Trump might not win since Roe is actually repealed and the first thing the anti abortionists did was ban all abortions -- which is exactly what they said they were going to do.
Boy, what it takes to get halfway through the head of a low information voter.
A few months ago -- I forget what venue it was in -- some reporter was surveying voters on the street about Roe decision and whether they supported Trump or Biden and this one young woman was going off about how she was furious at Biden for overturning Roe v. Wade and could never vote for him. Seriously.
It's scary how uninformed the average voter is about almost everything.
Saw a poll today where more people said they were better off economically 4 years ago versus today. Massive idiocy and massive failure of our media.
And their belief that life begins at conception is what will drive them to ban IVF and forms of birth control, no matter what Trump says, if they win in November.
Life one began once as far as we know, probably about four billion years ago here on earth unless we were cosmologically seeded.
The sperm, egg, and resulting gamete are all alive. Please get more precise language for whatever it is you are talking about.
Oh FFS, don't be an annoying pedant. You know quite well what was being referred to. The question is whether a being should be protected by laws that prevent killing/damaging human beings.
If I kill or harm you, I've almost certainly done something illegal. If I do damage to a sperm sample you left somewhere, eh, no biggie. Arguably both *might* be said to be alive, but they're treated very differently.
No, I am not. If you are talking about life, a scientific topic, that is one thing. If you are talking about rights or personhood, you are talking about a philosophical topic. They are completely distinct. You now seem to be on track, and are being clear that we are discussion the latter, not the former.
Human fetuses lie between, as in your example, myself and a sperm. Where is the line and who draws it in a democracy?
If you are talking about rights or personhood, you are talking about a philosophical topic.
If you're talking about rights or personhood, you're talking about a _legal_ topic, not a philosophic one, full stop. But you already knew that, because that was explained to you by multiple people the last time you were here.
But from a scientific viewpoint, what you said was 100% false.Consider a blood donation. That sack of blood is composed of living cells, but it is not a life form and no one (Except someone as ignorant as you) would describe it as alive.
"Where is the line and who draws it in a democracy?"
Roe v. Wade drew the line at fetal viability outside the womb.
Claiming to be acting on behalf of a fetus before then is taking rights away from an actual living, breathing human, and I think that's very wrong.
@Ogemaniac
This may shock you but what I write isn't intended to pass peer review of whatever pedantic journal you ought to be reading instead of a blog.
Also a shock no doubt, words can mean different things in different contexts.
life noun
1 b : a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings
5 c : the period from an event until death
8 : a vital or living being
16 b : animate activity and movement
With so many definitions, how can we ever know what someone means?
Sperm, eggs, and zygote easily meet definition 1b.
Au contraire. Ogemaniac’s point is not pedantry. If we had a Supreme Court that followed the Constitution, it would recognize that the Bill of Rights protects persons. That is why every US jurisdiction defines ‘death’ as ‘brain death’, which means that terminating life support for a body with no cortical activity is not murder, despite the life processes continuing in other tissues. Living human tissue =/= human person.
You'd also recognize the 9th amendment, which nullifies the argument that if a right isn't in the constitution, then it doesn't exist.
Nobody considers a sperm or an egg as a life form.
Don't discount the low-information voters who are convinced they're high-information voters, by which I mean the Berners, the Steiners, and various elements of the far left who voted to -- and I quote -- 'send a message'. _Despite_ being told over and over about how a Trump victory would alter the Supreme Court. And then _afterwards_ saying the current composition of the court is in no way their fault. Oh no, it was all on Clinton because -- get this -- she didn't 'excite' them.
Sometimes there is something to the 'both sides' argument, which in this case can be phrased as 'There are idiots on both sides.'
"I thought I wanted a baby, but I dunno now. After 8 months here, this is making me look fat, so let's get an abortion," said no woman, ever.
All this goes back to a comment made by former Virginia governor Ralph Northam discussing neo-natal pallative/hospice care for a severely disabled/unsurvivable fetus that might be delivered near or at term. He said the best course, *if it's what the parents wanted*, would be to make it comfortable, provide pain relief if necessary, and let nature take its course. In other words, not provide heroic medical interventions to keep the baby alive when there was virtually no hope of survival or any kind of quality of life, much like people stipulate in living wills all the time.
The forced birth nuts got a hold of this and started claiming that Northam and other pro-choice politicians are in favor of euthanizing born children. It's completely fucking nuts and kudos to Linsey Davis of ABC for calling out Trump's craven bullshit on this.
For the record, about 79% of abortions are performed on embryos. The rest are fetuses. None are babies or human beings or legal persons.
About 4.3% of abortions are performed after the 15th week. The Dobbs decision was based a case involving the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortion after the 15th week (instead of after viability, or about 24 weeks, per Casey). The court could have simply upheld the Mississippi law, and we'd have a new standard but 95% of abortions would continue to be legal. Instead, the court overturned Roe entirely and now 14 states have full bans and another 8 have partial bans.
Much damage has been done, but the court decision may be what spurs voters to abort the authoritarian dreams of Donald Trump and the conservative movement.
Where did you get those numbers?
There isn’t even a precisely agreed upon distinction between “fetus” and “embryo”, nor definition of when one arbitrarily becomes the other.
The numbers come from Kevin's chart. You can find it up top. The other part from Wikipedia:
Sorry if that doesn't meet your stringent standards for blog commenting, but if you don't like it you can take it up with the source.
Embryo and fetus are shifting terms. They mean differing things in any other species other than humans. In other species they overlap, with fetus being a subset. In humans, the language has evolved to separate them, but the line is fuzzy and ranges over several weeks. It appears to be arbitrarily based on "When does it kinda look human?" and nothing more. This has nothing to do with rights, and is a pretty useless distinction. Since there is no single word that covers zygote to baby in the birth canal, the abortion debate has generally adopted the word "fetus" as all-encompassing shorthand.
Still 100% wrong. You literally know no science.
“There are no records for this, but the number of abortions performed in the last two months of pregnancy is almost certainly close to zero and exclusively done in cases of severe fetal abnormality or danger to the mother.”
Wrong. There is very limited peer reviewed data, but there are a couple papers by Katrina Kimport you should read. Her sample sizes are too small to draw any statistical conclusions, but it is clear these late abortions occur for a mix of medical and non-medical reasons.
Also, read this interview with a doctor at one of those 14 clinics. It’s in substantial agreement with Kimport.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/05/dr-warren-hern-abortion-post-roe/674000/
Paywall. The first two paragraphs were nice.
But I agree with you that emjayay and steve22 are full of it. *Most* late-term abortions are performed for medical reasons, but not all. Female autonomy does not end at 24 weeks, nor should it.
The abortion question at its root is a question of at what point do the growing fetus’s rights trump those of the mother. Generally for healthy pregnancies the median voter believes this occurs around viability or the middle of pregnancy.
As Kevin noted, only a trivial number of abortions occur after this point, though he pulled an incorrect assumption that they are effectively all medically necessary out of his heiney. In reality, there are a few hundred abortions of healthy pregnancies per year after this point. It’s a stupid hill for liberals to die on, yet most of us defend these or, contrary to evidence, deny they exist.
You don't have facts at your side you just have the lying so called pro-life propaganda that masquerades as "facts". Let the doctors decide, let the women have the medical care they need without being judged.
Pro-lifers are notorious for making up facts to suit their agenda. Nobody has come forward to say they got an abortion for frivolous reasons late term and believe me there'd be sweet, sweet wingnut welfare for women to testify to justify the control the women crowd.
Heck yes this IS the hill to die on - otherwise more women will die, lose their quality of life or lose their ability to get pregnant again.
"The abortion question at its root is a question of at what point do the growing fetus’s rights trump those of the mother."
I'm not a theologian, but I've read that there are religious traditions in which the offspring has no claim to rights over the mother before birth. Mainstream traditions among people living in this country, not fringe ones. Should that be a consideration in this calculus, or not?
Ya got it all wrong, pal, that's not what it's about. What it's about is the right to personal autonomy. But you already know this and I don't think very well of people trying to pull a switcharoo.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9321603/
From my brief quick read of the link most 3rd trimester abortions are performed due to abnormalities with the fetus, a woman not realizing she's pregnant before the third trimester or women who face financial and legal difficulties that prevent them from getting an abortion earlier. The number of third trimester abortions isn't a hill you think liberals are dying on, it's not even a bump in the road. If you want to prevent third trimester abortions of healthy fetuses promote education, contraception and reduce regulations and other obstacles to access. But I highly doubt that's your desire.
Canada has no abortion law. Canada also has universal medical care, which covers abortions. Because abortions are covered, Canada doesn't see poor women seeking late abortions because they had to save up the money to pay for them. Canada sees very few late term abortions, and those are effectively all due to medical necessity involving a non-viable fetus. Once a healthy fetus is past viability, if the mother's health makes termination of pregnancy necessary, the pregnancy is terminated by inducing labor or by C-section, resulting in either case in a live, albeit premature, baby.
You do realize that the 25th nd 26th week are in the 2nd trimester.
Most of Kimports third trimester abortions occur in the 2nd trimester. Multiple of her alleged third trimester abortions occurred less than 4 weeks after the last menstrual period.
Oh you silly libs. Don't you know that the communist socialist dictators in the corporatist hospitals will put babies back into the womb by c-section, then forced out through the birth canal by suction machines? I saw someone say it on TV! /S
That's sad.
Donald Trump could have benefited mightily from an after birth abortion. I guess it's still an open possibility.
The best example is Canada, where no laws at all govern abortion services. It’s not quite “between a woman and her doctor”, because physicians are bound by the medical boards of each province, but abortion care is considered analogous to other medical procedures, with no need for involvement of the government or courts.
Very late term abortions are rare, usually done for the reasons discussed above (danger to the mother or severe fetal abnormalities).
See Wikipedia “Abortion in Canada” for history, discussion and links.
"The vast majority of these are between 24-28 weeks." the third trimester doesn;t start til the 27th week. So the substantial majority of his third trimester abortions are occurring in the 2nd trimester.