The most recent abortion data from the Centers for Disease Control reveal that more than four times as many human beings were killed by late-term abortions (21 weeks or later) in New York City than by recorded homicides in 2015 — 1485 abortions to 352 homicides. At CNS News, Terence P. Jeffrey writes that despite this fact, the New York Times recently pushed the idea — as has most mainstream media, repeatedly — that later abortions like this are “rare.” Jeffrey writes at CNS News:
In its story published Feb. 6, the Times said: “How common is it? Very rare. The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that about 1.3 percent of abortions performed in the United States in 2015 occurred in or after the 21st week of pregnancy.”
The NYT reiterated the same “rare” claim in an April 28th article, says Jeffrey. The CDC reports that abortions after 21 weeks or more make up 1.3% of the nation’s total abortions. But here’s the problem with that: It is unknown how “rare” later abortion is because state abortion reporting is entirely voluntary. Jeffrey points out:
The CDC data the New York Times referenced in its Feb. 6 story, when it said “about 1.3 percent of abortions performed in the United States in 2015 occurred in or after the 21st week of pregnancy,” was published in Table 7 of the CDC’s report, “Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2015.”
That report, released on Nov. 23, 2018, includes the most recent abortion data published by the CDC.
Table 7 lists the number of abortions performed by gestational age in 39 states and New York City, which were the 40 jurisdictions that reported their 2015 abortions by gestational age to the CDC.
A footnote attached to Table 7 says eleven states and the District of Columbia were not included in the table’s data on abortions by gestational age because, as the CDC put it, they “did not report, did not report by gestational age, or did not meet reporting standards.” These non-reporting states included California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York State, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
New York City, however, did report abortion data to the CDC.
READ: Planned Parenthood: We want to do more late-term abortions
Two of the states choosing not to report abortion data — California and New York — are ranked as two of the five least restrictive states for abortion. Since New York’s passage of the Reproductive Health Act in January of 2019, now neither California nor New York even requires that abortions be done by physicians. Read more on New York’s extreme abortion law here. Illinois legislators — where pro-abortion Democrats currently hold the House, Senate, and Governorship, and which is also on the list of non-reporting states — are considering following New York’s lead in liberalizing abortion laws.
While 1.3% of reported abortions may make late-term abortions indeed sound “rare,” the term is clearly relative. Using the Guttmacher Institute’s abortion statistics — which tend to be higher than the CDCs because Guttmacher claims to directly poll abortion providers — 926,200 abortions were reported in 2014, and 1.3% of those were 21 weeks or later, which means that upwards of 12,000 viable preborn children were killed in the second and third trimesters in just one year in the U.S.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest and most profitable abortion provider, actually has a goal to increase its late-term abortions. If they meet that goal, the media will have an even more difficult job of downplaying the number committed every year.
And as Jeffrey pointed out at CNS News, “The 1,485 babies aborted at 21-weeks gestational age or older in New York City in 2015 equaled about 4.1 per day in a 365-day year.” Again, that’s just in New York City, where 2.3% of all abortions happened after 21 weeks — higher than the national percentage.
In addition, contrary to the narrative pushed by the abortion-friendly media, women don’t get later abortions simply because of health reasons or fetal anomalies. Abortion industry studies admit that most late-term abortions are done for other reasons. A previous Live Action News article noted:
A 1988 Guttmacher study noted that only 2% of women seek late-term abortions because of a fetal abnormality. Pro-abortion researcher Diana Greene Foster has stated, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service, that abortions for fetal abnormalities “make up a small minority of later abortion.” Foster’s 2013 study published by the Guttmacher Institute states, “data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” In addition, a 2010 paper from Julia Steinberg with the pro-abortion Bixby Center for Global Health states, “Research suggests that the overwhelming majority of women having later abortions do so for reasons other than fetal anomaly (Drey et al., 2006; Finer et al., 2005, 2006; Foster et al., 2008).”
It’s unlikely that the media would attempt to downplay homicides in society as “rare” and of little consequence. They have no problem, however, downplaying the thousands of deaths from late-term abortion.
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