A California OB-GYN who used to abort unborn babies said the claim that late-term abortions are sometimes necessary to save a mother’s life is “categorically untrue.”
Speaking with Faithwire this week, Dr. Vansen Wong explained that killing a viable, late-term unborn baby is never necessary. In emergency situations like preeclampsia, doctors will perform a C-section right away to remove the baby and treat the mother, he said. A late-term abortion typically takes two to three days.
“The quick answer is: it’s categorically untrue and it is illogical to say that,” Wong told Faithwire. “After viability, so after 22 weeks, a baby could survive.”
An OB-GYN for more than 30 years, Wong said he did hundreds of abortions early in his career in Sacramento before he became a Christian. As a young doctor, he said he began doing abortions for “primarily financial” reasons, but he eventually realized the truth and stopped.
Now, Wong speaks out against abortion publicly and has testified against pro-abortion legislation in the California legislature. Next week, California voters will consider whether to add a state constitutional amendment that would create a “right” to abortions for any reason without restriction.
Wong and others have been speaking out against Proposition 1, warning that it would allow unborn babies to be aborted for any reason up to birth. He told Faithwire that there is never a need to abort a viable, late-term unborn baby because of the mother’s health.
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“Let’s pull out a hypothetical,” he said. “A woman gets diagnosed with cervical cancer at 23 weeks. In order to start treatment as soon as possible, we’ve got to end the pregnancy so that she can begin her treatment combination of surgery and radiation that is incompatible with pregnancy. The process at 23 weeks would be to induce the labor and, lo and behold, you’d get a live baby.
“So, there is never any reason that you have to end a baby’s life after viability for the welfare of a mother, because, if the welfare of the mother is at stake, you would induce her labor,” he explained.
Thousands of other doctors also have confirmed this. In 2019, leaders of the American College of Pediatricians, American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical groups published an open letter explaining why late-term abortions are never necessary.
They wrote:
After 20 weeks fertilization age, it is never necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being in order to save a woman’s life. [5] In cases where the mother’s life actually is in danger in the latter half of pregnancy, there is not time for an abortion, because an abortion typically is a two to three-day process. Instead, immediate delivery is needed in these situations, and can be done in a medically appropriate way (labor induction or C-section) by the woman’s own physician. We can, and do, save the life of the mother through delivery of an intact infant in a hospital where both the mother and her newborn can receive the care that they need. There is no medical reason to intentionally kill that fetal human being through an inhumane abortion procedure, e.g. dismembering a living human being capable of feeling pain [6] [7] [8], or saline induction which burns off the skin, or feticide with subsequent induction.
Meanwhile, a new study from ANSIRH, a pro-abortion research group at the University of California, contradicts the popular claim that most late-term abortions happen because of serious health problems with the mother or her unborn baby, Live Action News reports.
“The reasons people need third-trimester abortions are not so different from why people need abortions before the third trimester…” the researchers wrote. “[T]he circumstances that lead to someone needing a third-trimester abortion have overlaps with the pathways to abortion at other gestations.”
According to the study, women have third-trimester abortions for a number of reasons, including difficulty obtaining an abortion, the inability to afford an abortion earlier, failure to realize she was pregnant earlier, and medical problems with the unborn baby. None of the abortions in the study were because of medical problems with the mother, according to the report.
There are few statistics about the number of late-term abortions on viable unborn babies in the U.S. every year, but estimates put the number in the thousands. Unborn babies are viable after about 22 weeks of pregnancy now, thanks to modern medicine.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, 1.3 percent of abortions in 2012 were done at 21 weeks of pregnancy or later. Considering there are about 900,000 abortions a year in the U.S., a rough estimate would put the number at approximately 11,700 late-term abortions annually.
