On May 2, 2017, a pro-life woman working undercover called the abortion facility Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque in order to find out if they would commit an abortion on a healthy baby at 30 weeks. According to the Southwestern Women’s Options website, the abortion facility advertises abortions up to 28 weeks and “later abortions for fetal indications.” The facility would kill a 28 week baby on request, and a disabled baby even later, but would they kill a perfectly healthy 30 week child, solely at the request of the mother? Read on.
In the call, the pro-lifer asks to schedule an abortion, and the abortion worker asks her the date of her last normal period. This is the way abortion facilities and doctors’ offices calculate length of pregnancy, because it is easier to measure than time of conception. The caller gives the information, and, after a pause, the abortion worker calculates that she is 30 weeks along. Instead of telling the caller that the pregnancy is too advanced, the worker transfers her to a scheduler to set up her abortion.
The next abortion worker gives her name as Susan. The conversation with abortion worker Susan goes as follows:
Susan: Do you have a BPD measurement or a due date? [BPD is a measurement of the size of the baby’s head. It is used to date late-term pregnancies]
Caller: I have a due date, is July 15.
Susan: Okay, so… Almost 30. 30. Is there anything wrong with the fetus?
Caller: No, there’s not. It’s more just life happening. My husband lost his job, we already have some kids. We were planning to continue the pregnancy, but now our world’s falling apart, we just felt like this was the best way out.
Susan: I would have to take some information and take this to the doctor to see if she would accept you as a patient.
Susan then asked some questions including, “You have how many living children?”
Failing to get a statement that the baby has a disability, the worker then tries to coach the caller into claiming that she has a health problem that could be used to justify an abortion.
Susan: Do you yourself have anything going on medically, like asthma or diabetes, high blood pressure?
Caller: No.
In reality, none of these conditions would cause a woman to be at risk. In the third trimester, as we will see below, an abortion takes several days to complete. A third trimester abortion requires an injection of a drug into the baby’s heart to cause fatal cardiac arrest, and the woman needs to go through induced labor. Killing the baby at 30 weeks would not be any safer for a woman with high blood pressure, asthma, or diabetes than giving birth. Labor would have to take place either way. To have a live baby, a woman at 30 weeks could just be induced, without poisoning the baby. If labor was not feasible, she could have a C-section.
Facility staffer Susan then asks some routine questions about medical history, number of pregnancies, height and weight of the patient, medications being taken, etc. then she asks if the caller has private insurance or New Mexico Medicaid.
Then Susan asks a few more questions:
Susan: So this was a wanted pregnancy?
Caller: Yes.
Susan: So tell me a little a bit about what happened in your life now, I know you said that your husband just lost his job –
Caller: Yes. He lost his job and so… And that really… We’re really struggling to make it as it is. So obviously that puts a strain on the marriage, and everything else, and now with the prospect of another child coming along, it’s just really weighing heavily on us and adding unneeded stress. So we kind of asked around, people just recommended maybe calling you guys, as a –
Susan: Okay.
Caller: – a means to help with the situation. It was really not something we were planning for, but, you know, life happens.
Susan: So I think that’s all I need right now. She [the abortionist] is here, so I’m going to take this to her. So let me tell you also a little about the procedure that we do here. This will require you to be in Albuquerque from Monday night through Friday evening. It’s a procedure of termination by induction. So we actually would start on Tuesday morning, we will take a day or two to soften and dilate the cervix, and then we will induce labor. So you will be going through the act of labor and delivery of a stillborn fetus. We will euthanize the fetus on the first day. And again, you need to be in Albuquerque during that time.
Former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino illustrates this type of abortion in the video below:
There is a brief pause while Susan talks to the doctor. Then she comes back and says:
Well, the doctor accepted you as a patient, we will be scheduling you for Tuesday next week.
Then a few questions are asked and answered about payment (private insurance vs. Medicaid) and as easily as that, a 30 week abortion is scheduled.
A baby born at 30 weeks has a very high chance of living and growing up healthy. If the caller had been a real abortion patient and had given birth on the way to the abortion facility, the child would have likely survived. More than 95 percent of babies born at 30 weeks survive. Those that don’t often have some kind of health problem beginning in utero. When a healthy baby is born at 30 weeks, the child almost always lives.
Incidentally, I was born at 28 weeks in 1975. Even four decades ago, medicine was advanced enough for a baby born at that age to live and grow up — in my case, to grow up and be a pro-life activist. It’s appalling that Southwestern Women’s Options would (and no doubt has) killed a baby at this age, fully viable outside the mother.
The recording the caller listened to while on hold stated:
Today, Dr. Boyd and his medical staff remain personally committed to providing medically safe and emotionally supportive care… medical abortions, and surgical abortions in all trimesters.
Dr. Boyd is Dr. Curtis Boyd, who does late term abortions at Southwestern along with the other abortionists Carmen Landau, Emily Rothman, and Shelley Sella, who was once implicated in the alleged live birth of an aborted baby. There is no way to know which of these abortionists the SWO staffer consulted.
Pro-lifers now have proof that Southwestern Women’s Center will commit abortions in the third trimester for any reason. All a woman has to do is say that she is under great stress, and her fully developed, viable baby will be killed.
You can read more about Southwestern Women’s Options here.
