Late-Term Abortions "Are Not a Myth"

As America's abortion debate heats up again, the pro-death Democrats and the abortion industry have been working to make voters believe that late-term abortions are a myth. But now an admission to the contrary has appeared in an unusual source: the left-wing Washington Post

On September 20, the Post published an op-ed by columnist Kathleen Parker lamenting that, over the course of the current presidential campaign and its focus on state abortion bans, “we’ve heard little to nothing about the nine states and the District of Columbia that allow abortion no matter what the age of the fetus.”

“We don’t like to hear about these procedures because they complicate a preferred understanding that late-term abortions never happen unless some genetic or other physical anomaly would condemn the child to a life of misery and/or early death,” Parker writes. “Democrats bent on restoring [abortion-on-demand] would have us believe that no state would allow a fully formed baby to be aborted, and it is rational to believe this. But such is not always the case. In fact, a doctor profiled in a 2023 Atlantic article, Warren Hern, performs abortions up to 32 weeks and sometimes later. Hern estimated that about half of his later-term abortions are of healthy babies.”

Acknowledging that she prefers “encouraging education over judicial fiat as the best way of reducing abortion,” Parker notes that the abortion lobby opposes even this much, even though “[m]ost doctors wouldn’t remove a gall bladder with as little information as many abortion providers are willing to offer their clients. Are they afraid a woman might change her mind based on a better understanding of what is about to be done?”

She goes on to note that Hern has committed late-term abortions simply because the mother wanted a child of a different sex, tolerated in part by “abortion culture [having] had the undesirable, if predictable, effect of making us less horrified by worse and worse.”

“At 27 weeks, the last week of the second trimester, the fetus’s brain is active, sleeping and waking – eyes wide open – on a regular schedule,” she notes. “Lungs are incomplete, but he or she could survive outside the mother’s body even earlier. This is no matter to the nine states and the District of Columbia.”