Ever since Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris insisted that “nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion” in the presidential debate, the mainstream media has rallied to present late-term abortion and infanticide as right-wing myths, despite a factual record tying Democrats to both very real problems.
Former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump accused Democrats of supporting “abortion in the ninth month” and “execution after birth,” sparking a wave of “fact-checks” from the press:
- CNN: “The origins of Trump’s false claim that Democrats want to allow ‘execution’ of babies after birth”
- CBS News: “Trump falsely claims Democrats support abortions ‘after birth.’ Here’s a fact check.”
- NBC News: “Trump made false claims about ‘late-term abortion’ during the debate, experts say”
- NPR: “Trump repeats the false claim that Democrats support abortion ‘after birth’ in debate”
- USA Today: “No state allows people to ‘execute the baby’ after birth, as Trump claims during debate”
But while Trump did not explain the situation beyond invoking former Democrat Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s infamous 2019 comments defending the option to let an infant die after being delivered alive following a failed abortion, the record shows that such late abortions happen, existing laws do not suffice to prevent them, and most national Democrats including Harris oppose doing anything about it.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reviewed by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), while more than 90% of abortions occur in the first trimester, more than 50,000 abortions a year take place after 15 weeks (almost four months into pregnancy), and approximately 10,000 after 20 weeks (five months).
Further, CLI documents that various pro-abortion sources affirm most of these abortions are not sought for extreme so-called “medical emergencies,” as their defenders insist. A 2013 Guttmacher report admitted “data suggests that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment,” and notorious late-term abortionist Warren Hern’s own published data found that “fetal abnormalities” ranged from just a fifth to a third of his patients – and that the most common of those “abnormalities” was Down syndrome, a condition that is neither a death sentence nor even a guarantee of an unhappy life. In any case, direct abortion is always gravely immoral and is never needed nor justified for “health” reasons.
To put late-term abortion numbers in perspective, Institute for Family Studies demographer Lyman Stone writes, “Abortions after 32 weeks are a very small share of total abortions – perhaps 0.5%.”
That would come to 5,000 third-trimester abortions – which, while a seemingly small number in isolation, would account for 2-in-10 homicides in the U.S. and be “second biggest cause of death among people under 18 (after congenital immaturity).”
As for the incidence of infanticide, “[a]lthough the United States fails to record reliable data on abortion survivors, we have estimated, through Canadian government extrapolations, that 1,734 infants are born alive after a failed abortion procedure every year in the United States,” says the Abortion Survivors Network. “In other words, about 2 out of every 1,000 abortions result in a live birth. After 49.5 years of Roe v Wade, 85,817 babies lived through an abortion procedure.”