In a blog post, a woman named Heather shares that she went into labor with identical boy twins at 22-weeks because she had an incompetent cervix. Initially, this went undetected but when she went to a specialist it was discovered during an ultrasound and an exam. Unfortunately, immediately after the doctors saw that her cervix was shortening and delivering healthy babies was unlikely, they offered Heather an abortion.
Heather said, “They told us we could just end the pregnancy right there, quick and simple. It broke my heart to even hear it, because I knew we would never do that. We had to fight for our babies! I had seen them in about 10 ultrasounds at that point, and I knew they were alive. I felt them kicking inside of me and they already each had their own little personalities. I just knew we had to do everything we could to try to save them, and we did!”
After Heather refused abortion she did go into labor and her twins died of natural causes. This was certainly devastating for Heather and her husband but they are still glad they refused abortion. She explained, “There is no medical intervention for babies under 24 weeks in the US, which was hard, because once they were born I had to watch them struggle to breathe and wasn’t able to help them. But they each died peacefully in our arms, and blessed our lives in that short time more than I could have ever imagined. We know that everything happens for a reason, and that we will see them again some day!”
Additionally, Heather and her husband were able to share amazing pictures of their twins with the world. On her website, Heather summaries why she decided to share her story publicly.
She said, “With all this talk of abortion right now, I want people to know that this is what a 22 week old child looks like. This was just minutes after my twins passed away after living and breathing for about 30 minutes last November (Chase, the one on the right, looks different because he was in the sac without amniotic fluid for a couple days).”
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She concluded, “It is legal to abort children at this age in way too many places. While I was holding my babies, wishing they would survive, babies at the same gestation that could have survived are being torn apart and discarded or sold. It makes my heart sad. There are so many better options (adoption being my personal favorite). These are precious children of God. I love you Chase and Cooper, and I hope someone will see this and reconsider their choice”
In the United States, 18,000 unborn babies die in painful late abortions every year.
As LifeNews previously reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 9,709 abortions were done at 18-20 weeks and 7,325 abortions were done on babies older than 21 weeks in 2011 alone. However, it is likely that these numbers are lower than the actual amount of late abortions that occur in the U.S. because the CDC has a long-standing history of under-reporting abortion totals.
Although abortion proponents argue that most babies killed in late abortions suffer from rare fetal abnormalities, this is not always the case.
The sponsor of the federal Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, Trent Franks (R-Arizona), explained, “More than 18,000 ‘very late term’ abortions are performed every year on perfectly healthy unborn babies in America. These are innocent and defenseless children who can not only feel pain, but who can survive outside of the womb in most cases, and who are torturously killed without even basic anesthesia. Many of them cry and scream as they die, but because it is amniotic fluid going over their vocal cords instead of air, we don’t hear them.”
The brutality of late abortion doesn’t make them worse than other abortions performed earlier in pregnancy; however, it does stimulate the “moral imagination” of our culture, which is why it is important to share stories of women who have given birth to pre-term babies. In 2014, Dr. Carter Snead, the director of Notre Dames Center for Ethics and Culture, explained that the science behind fetal pain has the ability to awaken America’s conscience. If America can see an unborn child’s humanity and sympathize with their suffering, then maybe there’s hope we change the way people view all abortion.
