The media is continuing its efforts to change the narrative surrounding abortion after viability, trying to make it appear as if these induced abortions are normal and necessary health care procedures. In reality, they are violent acts that intentionally kill a preborn child who is capable of surviving outside of the womb.
Time magazine recently published an article claiming to show “what it really means to get an abortion after ‘fetal viability.'” Though premature babies have survived as early as 21 weeks, the age of viability is widely considered to begin at 24 weeks gestation. However, abortionists have stated that “viability” is a subjective concept that is not simply based on a child’s gestational age, and can be arbitrarily decided based on numerous other factors.
Time led readers to believe that late abortions largely take place due to medical necessity, or because the preborn child has been diagnosed with a disability — an idea that research has, for decades, failed to prove. Yet it let slip that the real motive in promoting abortion after viability is to remove all restrictions on killing preborn human beings.
Abortion at any time for any reason
“When you look at the data of who is seeking abortion later in pregnancy, the vast majority of these cases are because of those exceptions,” Dr. Maya Bass, a family physician, abortionist, and co-chair of the Committee to Protect Health Care’s Reproductive Freedom Taskforce, told Time. “But I will say that anytime you have an exception, that’s an extra barrier that a patient has to prove that they are the exception to get the care, which is only further delaying their care. At some level, we need to let the patient-physician relationship remain unaffected by politics.”
Essentially, Bass — and other abortion advocates — want abortion legal for any reason at any time through all 40 weeks of pregnancy — and are willing to exploit tragic stories of child loss, prenatal diagnosis, and maternal health emergencies to justify that desire. Though Time admitted that women will seek out late-term abortions for reasons other than these — such as not realizing they were pregnant or because they had trouble getting an abortion prior to viability — the magazine still emphasized examples it thought would play on the emotions of its readers.
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Ableism in disguise
Kate Dineen told Time her baby had a “catastrophic” stroke in the womb at 33 weeks, which doctors said would lead to death before birth, or “a short and painful life.” Though abortion is legal after viability in her home state of Massachusetts for “lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis” or “a grave fetal diagnosis that indicates that the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions,” Dineen’s baby wasn’t considered sick enough to be eugenically killed.
So she and her husband traveled from Massachusetts to Bethesda, Maryland (home of now-deceased abortionist LeRoy Carhart’s dangerous CARE clinic), to undergo a near-full-term abortion.
Another woman, Anne Angus, learned her preborn baby had Eagle-Barrett, or prune belly syndrome, a condition in which the baby’s abdominal muscles are weak or missing. Though severe cases can lead to stillbirth, the majority of babies born with prune belly syndrome are able to survive and live long lives, albeit possibly needing ongoing medical treatment. Regardless, Angus and her husband decided to end their baby’s life in the womb, framing it as the more “compassionate” option.
If a person doesn’t want to raise a child with a disability, it does not give her the right to murder that child, whether he is born or preborn. A person with a disability has as much of a right to life as an able-bodied person, regardless of how short that life might be or what it might look like. Ultimately, late abortions of children with disabilities boil down to one thing — and it isn’t medical necessity. It’s ableism.
Why are most late abortions committed?
Despite acknowledging that most late-term abortions are not carried out for medical reasons, Time focused on emotionally exploitative stories regarding medical diagnoses. These, however, are not why most late-term abortions are committed.
A 1988 Guttmacher study found that just two percent (2%) of women who had abortions did so because of a health problem with the baby. More than 20 years later, a 2013 study (also 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).
Pro-abortion researcher Diana Greene Foster stated, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service, that abortions for fetal diagnosis “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).”
Guttmacher further explained that most reasons for late-term abortions were “logistical” delays and that most women would have preferred to get abortions earlier. These abortions were not committed because the woman’s life was at risk or because her baby was sick, despite what the media portrays.
What does late-term abortion look like?
Warning: Images of abortion victims below.
Time failed to explain or show what an actual abortion procedure after viability entails or looks like. The most common abortion procedure committed at or after 25 weeks gestation is an induction abortion; this procedure usually takes several days.
Typically, the abortionist first injects the baby with a fatal shot of digoxin or potassium chloride to induce cardiac arrest. Then he inserts laminaria, or seaweed sticks, into the mother’s cervix to forcibly dilate it. The woman is then sent home or to her hotel where she will wait for two or three days until she delivers what is intended to be a stillborn baby. There is a risk of the baby being born alive. If the baby does not come out intact, the abortionist often then completes the procedure using the dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion method to dismember the baby, tearing off limbs and crushing her skull.
Time also failed to show the aftermath of late abortion.
The media has long attempted to deceive the public about the appearance of victims of abortion. In a particularly egregious example, The Guardian published photos of pregnancy tissue from a pro-abortion organization, claiming to be the true result of a nine-week abortion. But the photos showed only gestational sacs, and did not include actual embryos. Even pro-abortion commenters to social media accused The Guardian of being deliberately dishonest to promote an agenda.
As Dr. Christina Francis, an OB/GYN and CEO of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told Live Action News, the images were “intentionally misleading,” adding, “They state that they are pictures of gestational sacs, ignoring the inconvenient fact that in pregnancy, the gestational sac surrounds the embryonic or fetal human being — which have clearly been removed before these photos were taken.”
Later in gestation, the aborted babies’ bodies aren’t so easy to hide. Late-term abortions are much more violent — as photos of the victims make clear. A group of babies now known as “The Five” illustrates just how horrific post-viability abortions are.
In March 2022, a medical waste truck driver gave a group of pro-life activists a box of fetal remains outside the facility of notorious Washington, D.C., abortionist Cesare Santangelo; while most of the bodies were of younger abortion victims, five appeared old enough to have been able to survive outside the womb. One, a boy whom pro-lifers named Christopher, was estimated to have been 28-32 weeks, well beyond when a baby can survive premature birth.
This little boy was fully intact, indicating that he likely was the victim of an induction abortion.
The next baby, a girl named Harriet, had significant damage to her body and was recovered curled into a fetal position with one of her eyes open. Dr. Kathi Aultman, a former abortionist who later became pro-life, previously told Live Action News that while it’s difficult to know what caused her death, it appears she might have been the victim of a federally illegal partial-birth abortion.
In this horrific procedure, the baby is maneuvered to be born breech — feet first; the entire body is delivered from the mother except for the head, and then the abortionist makes an incision near the base of the skull before inserting a powerful suction cannula into the incision to remove the baby’s brain.
The third baby, Holly, was likely the victim of a dilation and evacuation (D&E) dismemberment abortion.
She was found in pieces, with a detached arm, a crushed head, and legs still attached to her torso. It is estimated that she was 26-28 weeks gestation when she was killed.
Baby Phoenix was found en caul – or still in the amniotic sac – raising questions of whether he or she was born alive. The photos show one foot, clearly still pink, as well as a hand with veins that presumably became blue from a lack of oxygen.
“It is not possible to determine the sex in this view,” Aultman said. “It is difficult to discern the gestational age, but this baby is probably in the late 2nd or early 3rd trimester. An induction method would have been used for the abortion. Unless this baby was injected with a drug designed to kill prior to the abortion, he or she may very well have been born alive and then left to die. Without rupturing the amniotic sac, it would not have been possible to cut the cord to cause fetal death before the abortion.”
The final baby, a boy named Angel, also had his arms and legs ripped from his body in what was likely a D&E dismemberment abortion.
These images are difficult to see; for most people, they are heartbreaking. But this is what abortion after viability looks like.
This is what Time believes should be legal when a baby is diagnosed prenatally with a disability — or as Dr. Bass admitted, for any reason at all.
This violent death is what abortion activists say is more “compassionate” for a child with a disability.
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