In the United Kingdom, a pregnant woman says she has suffered “deep distress” because a doctor had to perform a later abortion on her baby than initially anticipated. Hertfordshire Mercury News reports that physicians at Lister Hospital in Stevenage told an unidentified pregnant woman she was eight-weeks pregnant when she was really past 16-weeks. Apparently, the doctor did not check the unborn baby’s age and only relied on the date of the woman’s last menstrual cycle.
However, this mistake did not stop the woman from obtaining the abortion; instead, she decided to have a medical abortion, which required that she endure a labor like delivery. A spokesperson for the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust explained that the incident took place at the hospital between December 2012 and January 2013.
He said, “At the time, the trust carried out its own investigation and identified the shortcomings in this patient’s care, for which it has apologized to her already. The trust also put in changes to its pregnancy termination service that prevent such a situation ever happening again. The report published today recognized and supported the changes that the trust had made already some time ago, saying ‘we are satisfied that this is appropriate’.”
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) released a report about the case showing that the NHS gave the woman almost $4,000 in compensation. Additionally, the trust reorganized their abortion service to try and prevent this from happening in the future.
As LifeNews previously reported, the most common abortion procedure performed on an unborn baby between 16-22 weeks gestation is the Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) abortion, also known as the dismemberment abortion. These abortions are just as brutal as the partial-birth abortion method, which are illegal in the United States.
Keep up with the latest pro-life news and information on Twitter. Follow @LifeNewsHQ
In 2000, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said the following about D&E dismemberment abortions: “The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.” Justice Kennedy added in the Court’s 2007 opinion, Gonzales v. Carhart, that D&E abortions are “laden with the power to devalue human life.”
In July, the State Legislative Director for National Right to Life, Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., shared more about second and third trimester abortion procedures. She said, “Dismemberment abortion kills a baby by tearing her apart limb from limb. Before the first trimester ends, the unborn child has a beating heart, brain waves, and every organ system in place. Dismemberment abortions occur after the baby has reached these milestones.”
