During his interview with The View yesterday, pro-abortion Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg falsely claimed late-term abortions are essentially only done in very rare circumstances where the baby is disabled.
Buttigieg claimed that “by definition” the only time when a baby is killed in a late-term abortion is because his or her parents received horrific news that the baby had severe problems.
“Think about the situation. If this is a late-term situation, then by definition it’s one where a woman was expecting to carry the pregnancy to term. Then she gets the most perhaps devastating news of her life. We’re talking about families that may have picked out a name, maybe assembling a crib and they learn something, excruciating, and are faced with this terrible choice,” the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor said.
“I don’t know what to tell them morally about what they should do,” he continued. “I just know that I trust her and her decision medically or morally isn’t going to be any better because the government is commanding her to do it.”
But that is a patently false presentation about the situations in which late-term abortions occur.
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Abortion lobbyists admit that most late-term abortions are done on healthy mothers carrying healthy babies. Guttmacher Institute statistics confirm that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” Instead, data suggest that “most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.”
And late-term abortionist Martin Haskell, who is credited with popularizing the partial-birth abortion procedure, said in a 1993 interview with American Medical News: “I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range…. In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective.”
Last year, New York Magazine featured the story of an Oregon woman who aborted her unborn baby at 28 weeks of pregnancy even though they both were healthy.
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life commented on Buttigieg’s remarks and told LifeNews that he is perfectly fine with abortions up to birth.
“He didn’t answer the question, which was, is he comfortable with laws that allow babies born alive after abortion to be killed,” Father Pavone said. “Moreover, what he said about late term abortion wasn’t much better. He fell back on the familiar – and inaccurate – trope that women only have late-term abortions for the most dire reasons. Not true.”
“As you can listen for yourself at ExposeAbortion.net, healthy women carrying healthy babies can make appointments to have those babies killed by abortion even at 32 weeks or more of pregnancy,” he added.
Meanwhile, a new survey of abortion facilities in the U.S. has revealed a new, disturbing industry-wide trend that shows that overall in 2019, surgical abortion facilities have expanded into the late-term abortion market, where lucrative multi-day procedures can reap quick profits. Currently, there are 143 surgical abortion facilities that will conduct abortions at 20 weeks or more.
Over the past ten years, the number of abortion facilities that are willing to openly conduct abortions into the third trimester of pregnancy starting at 28 weeks changed little – until 2019 when the number jumped from six to eight.
Media outlets routinely describe the numbers of late-term abortions as ” very rare,” citing the fact that they account for only 1.3 percent of all abortions. But the percentage value minimizes the actual numbers.
There are more than 12,000 abortions annually after 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the abortion lobby. It does not refer to the number of children who die annually in car crashes (about 4,000), gun violence (about 3,000), or childhood cancers (about 2,000) as “very rare.” Yet each of these tragic numbers is only a fraction of the 12,000 viable children aborted late in pregnancy.
