Third-Trimester Abortionist Leroy Carhart Has Died

Leroy Carhart, infamous as one of the few doctors in the United States to openly advertise abortions in the third trimester, died last week of natural causes. Unlike the unborn children he ruthlessly targeted, Carhart enjoyed a long life. He was 81 years old.

Carhart was a champion of the partial-birth abortion method (euphemized by its supporters as “intact dilation and extraction”). In a partial-birth abortion, the child’s lower body and torso are delivered in breech position, as shown above. The abortionist then stabs the base of the baby’s skull and sucks out the brain, causing death mere moments before the child would otherwise be born alive. The method gives lie to the rhetoric that abortion is about vindicating a woman’s bodily autonomy; quite obviously, the goal is a dead baby. The Supreme Court upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortion in the 2007 case of Gonzalez v. Carhart, but he continued killing children in the womb by other means.

At least two mothers also died at Carhart’s hands: Jennifer Morbelli, who was attempting to kill her unborn daughter Madison after a prenatal diagnosis of disability, and Christen Gilbert, who herself had Down Syndrome and whose ability to give informed consent to the abortion has been questioned.

LifeNews reports that Carhart’s grandson, Lee Carhart, intends to carry on his grandfather’s gruesome trade.

[Illustration credit: Tanja Butler, via NRLC]