Pro-Abortion Doctors Admit Late-Term Abortions are Not Medically Necessary
How can anyone justify killing a preborn baby just weeks before he or she could be born full-term?
Third-Trimester Abortion Claims
Pro-choice activists sometimes claim that third-trimester abortions need to be legal to save women’s lives.
These pro-abortion activists know that many people shudder at the thought of killing a fully formed baby who could survive outside his or her mother’s womb. They know that the simple “my body, my choice” slogan isn’t enough to convince the public that aborting full-term babies should be legal.
To justify these abortions, pro-choicers sometimes say that if late-term abortions are banned, pregnant peoples’ lives would be at risk; people need late-term abortions to save their lives.
Sometimes, they say that third-trimester abortions are only done to save the mother’s life or for the most dire medical complications.
This argument often comes from the pro-abortion side. But unfortunately, it also comes from those who, by all rights, should be pro-life allies.
An example is Consistent Life Ethic proponent Shane Claiborne’s book Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person.
Claiborne supports the Consistent Life Ethic and is active in the fight against the death penalty. In his book, he opposes various forms of violence. However, he equivocates on abortion. He seems to believe abortion should be legal in some or most circumstances.
On third-trimester abortion, Claiborne writes:
The primary reason given for an abortion late in pregnancy is medical, usually to address a threat to the mother’s health… Abortions in the third trimester are devastating situations that account for 1.3 percent of abortions in the United States, approximately six thousand per year.
I have never met a single person who has chosen to terminate a pregnancy in the third trimester when it was not a life-threatening medical emergency. And I have tried to find those people!1
How Third-Trimester Abortions Are Done, and What That Means
Is it true that all third-trimester abortions are done because a pregnant person’s life or health is in danger? Common sense seems to indicate that it isn’t. A third-trimester abortion is performed by injecting poison (usually dioxin or potassium chloride) into the baby to kill him or her, and then inducing labor.
An article on Shelly Sella, who does third-trimester abortions, explains the procedure:
The abortion procedure after 25 weeks is an agonising four-day trial. The baby is first euthanised with an injection of a drug, through the mother’s abdomen, that gradually stops the heart…
The cervix is then softened with a seaweed-based pessary, then birth is induced with a drip. The labour itself is as arduous as with a live baby.
The person having the abortion essentially “gives birth” to a dead baby.
In both a third-trimester abortion and a traditional live birth, the pregnant person needs to go through labor. The only difference is that in an abortion, the abortionist injects the baby with poison first, killing him or her. This is done for no other reason than to prevent a live birth.
It seems to be common sense that injecting deadly poison into a pregnant person’s body would carry risk. It is hard to believe that it’s safer to inject poison and induce labor rather than to simply induce labor without the poisonous injection.
I’ve never seen any statistics on complications related to the feticidal injection specifically, but it isn’t done to benefit the pregnant person, just to kill the baby. It doesn’t treat any illness on the pregnant person’s part. In that, it’s purely elective. Logically, it would seem more dangerous to do the injection than not to do it.
We’re talking about a deadly poison being injected through one person’s body into the body of another. I can’t believe it’s 100% safe. And even if it is, it certainly has no physical benefit for the pregnant person involved. Not doing it wouldn’t put her at risk in any way.
It won’t save her life or protect her health, and it doesn’t make the delivery any safer. It’s done because she and the abortionist want a dead baby instead of a live one.
Not doing the injection doesn’t put the woman at any risk. She just doesn’t get the dead baby she wants.
So, if her life is in danger, or she is experiencing a serious pregnancy complication, the doctor can just induce labor. Or, if labor would be dangerous, he or she can do a C-section.
Quotes from Pro-Abortion Doctors
Way back in 1972, when abortion’s legality was still being debated, the medical director of the Pittsburgh Planned Parenthood, Dr. Rose R. Middleman, said:
It’s extremely rare, if not nonexistent, for a physician to have a medical reason to abort a woman in the 7th or 8th month.2
Middleman’s statement is very revealing. It comes from a pro-abortion Planned Parenthood doctor, who had every reason to stick to the pro-choice talking points.
This doctor’s admission probably did not sit well with those who were advocating for late-term abortion, because it revealed the truth.
If in 1972, late-term abortion wasn’t needed to save the lives or preserve the health of pregnant people, abortion is probably even less necessary today. There have been many medical advances in the past fifty years.
Another quote comes from a then-practicing abortionist, Dr. Don Sloan. When Sloan wrote his book Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma in 2002, he had already performed over 20,000 abortions. He said:
If a woman with a serious illness- heart disease, say, or diabetes — gets pregnant, the abortion procedure may be as dangerous for her as going through pregnancy…
[W]ith diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis, even breast cancer, the chance that pregnancy will make the disease worse is no greater than the chance that the disease will either stay the same or improve.
And medical technology has advanced to a point where even women with diabetes and kidney disease can be seen through a pregnancy safely by a doctor who knows what he’s doing. We’ve come a long way since my mother’s time….
The idea of abortion to save the mothers’ life is something that people cling to because it sounds noble and pure — but medically speaking, it probably doesn’t exist. It’s a real stretch of our thinking.3
Dr. Sloan believed that abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s life at any time in pregnancy. He believes that the “life of the mother” argument is a smoke screen, a useful argument, but not based on fact.
Sometimes, pregnancy can complicate illnesses. Still, this abortion provider admits that most times, a competent doctor can see a pregnant person through even the most difficult pregnancy.
When pro-lifers claim that abortion is seldom necessary to save a woman’s life, (and never necessary in the last trimester), people might doubt them. When pro-abortion doctors say the same thing, it is not as easy to dismiss.
The Journal of the American Medical Association Weighs In
The Journal of the American Medical Association is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. In 1998, it published an article on late-term abortion which stated:
Except in extraordinary circumstances, maternal health factors which demand termination of the pregnancy can be accommodated without sacrifice of the fetus, and the near certainty of the independent viability of the fetus argues for ending a pregnancy by appropriate delivery.4 (emphasis added)
It’s not medically necessary to kill a baby in the third trimester. Either labor or a cesarian section could remove the baby alive.
So, what about the people Claiborne claims to have spoken to? I don’t know if Claiborne is deceiving us, if the people he talked to deceived him, or if the doctors of the people he mentions deceived them—but someone is being deceitful.
It seems unlikely that a doctor could convince a pregnant person that she must inject her baby with toxic poison to save her own life, but I suppose it’s possible.
Clinics Advertise Third-Trimester Abortions
I will publish a follow-up article with information from studies and quotes from abortionists on the real reasons third-trimester abortions are done.
But for now, take a look at these screenshots from some of the abortion facilities that are advertising third-trimester abortions on their websites. These clinics are encouraging people to make appointments. They certainly aren’t just providing their “services” to people who are dying of pregnancy complications.
Footnotes
1. Shane Claiborne Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023) 189, 190-191
2. “Doctor Refutes Abortion Claim” Reading Eagle June 14, 1972
3. Don Sloan, M.D. and Paula Hartz. Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma (New York: International Publishers, 2002) 45-46
4. Jeg Epner, HS Jonas, DL Seckinger “Late-term Abortion” Journal of the American Medical Association 1998; 280 (8): 724-729
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
The post Pro-Abortion Doctors Admit Late-Term Abortions are Not Medically Necessary appeared first on LifeNews.com.