Recent comments from former President Donald Trump about his support for a possible federal 16-week abortion limit have been in the news this week, with many in the pro-abortion media decrying the restrictions as a pro-life “ban.” Much attention has been given to the comments, including a response from President Joe Biden, who claimed, “Donald Trump is running to rip away your rights. Kamala and I are running to protect them.”
New polling from The Economist/YouGov shows that nearly half of the 1,562 respondents — 48% — expressed support for the idea of a 16-week national limit on abortions, according to The Hill. The outlet wrote that this percentage “includ[es] 27 percent who strongly support that restriction. Thirty-six percent said they would oppose such a ban, while another 16 percent said they were not sure.”
But what is missing from the media frenzy is a look at how “pro-life” a 16-week abortion restriction really is, and what abortion at 16 weeks really looks like.
Fetal development
At 16 weeks gestation, the mother is essentially four months into her pregnancy and well into her second trimester. At this stage, the preborn child can make complex facial expressions, with her nose and lips completely formed. She can bend her hips and knees, and she stretches and opens her mouth. Her teeth are growing and tastebuds are starting to form. Her heart has been beating since about 21 days after fertilization, while her brain activity began at about eight weeks gestation (6 weeks post-fertilization).
The average fetus at this age will weigh four ounces and measures slightly less than seven inches. Her mother may even begin to feel all this movement as she goes about her day.
Previable Baby Olivia at 16 weeks (Image credit Live Action)
Second-trimester abortion procedure
The most common form of abortion procedure at 16 weeks gestation is the dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure, which is typically utilized from 14-22 weeks gestation.
During this violent procedure, the child is often too large to pull from his mother’s womb intact, so the abortionist must take a sopher clamp, which is a steel instrument with teeth, and insert it into the womb in the hopes of grasping an arm or leg. The child is then dismembered, piece by piece. The abortionist knows that he has crushed the child’s skull when he sees a white substance — the child’s brain — leak out of the woman’s cervix. The entire procedure is explained in the video below:
While the procedure is horrific enough on its own, studies also indicate that beginning sometime around the end of the first trimester, the preborn child feels pain, which means that she feels the brutal procedure that results in her dismemberment.
The preborn child is fully human from the moment of fertilization
Abortion restrictions based off a certain time period are incompatible with a true pro-life position, because it is impossible to concede that life is worth saving at one point in time while arguing that up to a minute before that arbitrary cutoff, the same life can be legally snuffed out.
All human beings are valuable from the moment of fertilization, because they are members of the human species. It is a fallacy to say that a child is “more human” at 16 weeks than he is at six weeks, or even six minutes. From the moment of fertilization, when sperm meets the egg, a new life is formed. At that time, the child has his or her own, unique DNA. It is equally wrong to kill this human child at every single stage of development.
The pro-abortion media may decry protections for human beings at 16 weeks as a pro-life threat, but those committed to ending abortion must continue to fight until all preborn children have equal protection, both in and out of the womb.
