Maine is poised to enact a law (LD 1619) that will expand abortion in the state, making it legal through birth for any reason. Despite the loophole in the bill which allows abortionists to determine if an abortion is necessary even into the third trimester, the bill’s proponents — and more specifically, Rep. Lois Reckitt — claim that no abortionist would ever carry out an abortion that far into a pregnancy unless there was a significant medical reason.
This simply isn’t true.
“It basically allows for the abortion of a baby in the third trimester for any reason whatsoever, with no guardrails except for a physician has to sign off that it’s necessary. Necessary for what purpose? They never really explain,” Senator Eric Brakey said of the bill.
Senator Lois Reckitt argued back, “That’s not true. I mean, what doctor are you ever going to find that would do that? Standards of care in the medical profession would never allow that to happen. I want to trust the medical profession, and the women whose lives are at stake in this discussion, to do the right thing.”
Yet history shows that abortionists do not “do the right thing” when it comes to protecting preborn children from abortion. One such abortionist — Dr. Shannon Carr — is actively advocating for the extreme law Maine is about to enact, telling the Maine State House Judiciary Committee that “later abortions” are “life-saving health care.” Yet, she has admitted that her assessment of medical necessity for a second-trimester abortion was based on “speculation.”
Carr is one of the abortionists involved in the 24-week abortion that killed Keisha Atkins in 2017. The second-trimester abortion was carried out on a baby who was old enough to survive outside the womb, yet Carr claimed on paperwork that the abortion was “necessary.”
However, during testimony in a 2019 deposition concerning Atkins’ death, Carr struggled to explain why she deemed the abortion to be medically necessary.
In a medical document, Carr claimed that Atkins needed the abortion in order to prevent “substantial and irreversible harm to her physical health, her mental health, her family health, her safety and well being.”
Yet Carr only spoke to Atkins for 20 minutes.
When questioned about the diagnosis, Carr admitted that the pregnancy posed no irreversible physical harm. Carr simply made assumptions about Atkins’ mental health in order to justify a late-term abortion.
When asked directly how the pregnancy would have caused Atkins to suffer irreversible harm, Carr replied, “That would just be speculation of parenting at a young age as a single mom. Financially not stable; depression; anxiety. That would be speculation as to any forward effects on her mental health.”
Carr then confessed she is “not a psychiatrist” and therefore was not equipped to formally assess Atkins’ mental health.
Carr also admitted that she made these assumptions based on her perception of Atkins’ race. She said:
Again, wanting to get more education, not just work at Applebee’s for the rest of her life. Um, you know, I can’t know what she’s wanting to do with her life but certainly, having a child changes the calculus of what a young Latina woman is able to do in this – in this country.
A restaurant job is apparently something Carr disdains, but it is discriminatory to say that a restaurant worker needs an abortion, especially when Carr didn’t ask Atkins about her career aspirations.
But Atkins wasn’t even Latina. She was Black and Native American. Carr assumed Atkins’ ethnicity and then made a racist comment about Latina women being unable to achieve their goals without abortion.
Patient charts reveal that Atkins was not the only patient for whom Carr and other abortionists at SWO cited mental health concerns as the reason for their late abortions.
But abortionists at Southwestern Women’s Options are not alone in their reasonings and justifications for late abortions. Data from a 2013 study published by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute said, “[D]ata suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (emphasis added)
Additional research backs this study up. Pro-abortion researcher Diana Greene Foster stated that according to a report from the Congressional Research Service, abortions for fetal abnormalities “make up a small minority of later abortion.” And a 2010 paper from Julia Steinberg of the pro-abortion Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health said, “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).” (emphasis added)
To assume abortionists will “do the right thing” and not abort babies in the second and third trimesters is to ignore reality.
Babies will be aborted in Maine throughout pregnancy for any reason once this bill takes effect.
