Polling by Gallup and others has shown that most Americans oppose late-term abortion and support the banning of it in the second and third trimesters. Texas’s SB5 20-week abortion ban has brought the issue of banning late-term abortions back into the national spotlight, and now, pro-aborts are scrambling to find a way to make the abhorrent practice palatable to the public, with the media being more than complicit.
The latest example is in USA Today, where the official editorial board ran a piece justifying why women need late-term abortion. There’s the usual blather about how banning them would create more Gosnells, because he ignored his state’s 24-week abortion ban, which just makes perfect sense. And then we get to the meat of their argument: we need late-term abortions because otherwise, women won’t be able to kill babies with Down syndrome and other abnormalities!
Moreover, many grave, even lethal fetal anomalies aren’t discovered until or near 20 weeks, at which point some women decide to terminate a pregnancy. Bans will prevent reputable doctors from performing those abortions, leaving a void that criminals such as Gosnell will slither in to fill.
While some genetic conditions, such as Down syndrome, can be detected with amniocentesis at 16 to 22 weeks, even then it can take two weeks to get results. Add specialists, research and time to reflect, and a 20-week ban forces women and couples to make heartrending decisions against a ticking clock.
In some cases, they’d have no opportunity at all. Some of the most serious impairments — the failure of kidneys to materialize, or the development of organs outside the body — aren’t discovered before couples at low-risk for problems have routine ultrasounds, at about 18 to 20 weeks.
Finding out your child has a fetal abnormality is heartbreaking. Many times, the problem can be repaired after birth – if it even exists. Ultrasounds aren’t foolproof, after all. This is the most popular excuse pro-aborts trot out for late-term abortion, even though the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute has found that only around 2% of women have late-term abortions because some sort of fetal abnormality was found. It is overwhelmingly for reasons of convenience – but that just wouldn’t sell as well, would it?
But when a mother does get an actual diagnosis, such as Down syndrome after an amniocentesis, should she be allowed to then have an abortion? Babies who have a birth defect are not somehow broken – and it certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve a chance at life.
There are a million excuses for late-term abortion, such as just in case the baby has Down syndrome, because evidently it’s acceptable for us to decide for someone else whether or not her life is worth living. So often pro-aborts will say that they simply didn’t want their child to suffer – but who was the person who defined suffering? Who decided that this child’s life just wasn’t worth living? It wasn’t the person whose life was snuffed out, that’s for sure.
It isn’t acceptable for a parent to arbitrarily decide that her four-year-old’s life just isn’t working out so great anymore and that that child therefore should die. But it’s fine and dandy to do the exact same thing simply because the child is smaller, less developed, and more vulnerable? Please. It’s despicable, and the fact that it could be excused simply because the child might be different in some way makes this excuse even worse.
