Norway may become the next “abortion tourism” spot for women who are carrying twins.
This week, the Norwegian Ministry of Health ruled that foreign women pregnant with twins or greater multiples can come to the country to selectively abort unborn babies — even if the baby is perfectly healthy, according to The Local, a Norwegian news outlet.
Officials expect the ruling will prompt more women from Sweden and Denmark, where such abortions are restricted, to travel to Norway for abortions, according to the report. Abortions are legal through 12 weeks of pregnancy in Norway.
“All women, regardless of whether they are Norwegian or foreign women residing in Norway have the same right to abortion and fetal reduction,” health official Torunn Janbu told the news outlet.
Here’s more from the report:
According to NRK, several women from other Nordic countries had already contacted Norwegian hospitals about having the procedure.
Lawyers at Norway’s Department of Justice ruled in February that selective reduction procedures should be treated no differently under Norwegian law than any other abortion, and should therefore be legal up until the end of the 12th week of pregnancy. …
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The decision went against the advice of many doctors, who fear that the procedure carries risks for the health of both the mother and the remaining fetus.
“We have not found any medical benefit from this,” Dr Birgitte Heiberg Kahrs, a specialist in fetal medicine at St Olav’s Hospital in Oslo. “On the contrary, it exposes the second child in the womb to danger as the abortion risk increases.”
The decision may seem radical, but U.S. and Canadian laws are even more liberal. While Norway allows abortions up to 12 weeks for any reason, many American states allow women to abort their unborn babies up to 20 weeks of pregnancy or even later. Because of Roe v. Wade, a woman can abort an unborn baby for any reason or no reason at all up until viability in the U.S.
The reason for the abortion does not matter under U.S. and Canadian law. If a woman is carrying a girl in her womb and she wants a boy, she can have an abortion. If the unborn child has a cleft lip or Down syndrome, the mother can abort. If the mother simply does not want to parent twins, she can choose to abort one of her unborn children.
Such cases do occur. In 2012, sidewalk counselor Kelly Clinger shared a heartbreaking story with LifeNews about a Florida woman who aborted her twins at 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Clinger wrote:
… my friend John posted a picture of a girl who arrived at [Orlando Women’s Center] to abort her twin baby girls. She already had daughters and didn’t want anymore. She was about 20 weeks along, but because she was pregnant with twins, she had a BIG belly. Within a few hours, the picture went viral. I began to get phone calls & emails from friends who had no idea this was going on. Many offered financial help and MANY offered to adopt her babies. Thousands of people all of over the world were praying that this girl would change her mind…and thousands were saying the picture was a hoax or that what she was doing was illegal. …
The girl … ended up aborting the twin girls in her womb even though we had every kind of help she would ever need ready for her. She admitted that she didn’t want girls and that she had no compassion for the babies she was carrying. Through a 2 day process, she actually had to go into labor and deliver her sweet babies into a toilet. Abortions like these happen ALL over the country EVERYDAY.
A few states and Canada also allow late-term abortions when unborn babies are viable outside the womb. According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control report, more than 9,000 babies were killed in abortions occurring at or after 21 weeks in 2012 in the United States. Currently, 22 weeks is the earliest time a baby can survive outside the womb.
