What do they mean by “after-birth abortion”?
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Regarding “after-birth abortion,” there are (at least) three distinctions to keep in mind.
1) There are distinctions between ending a pregnancy when there is an adverse prenatal diagnosis versus when there isn’t.
Sometimes parents will receive an adverse prenatal diagnosis, and they will opt for a peri- or post-viability premature induction of labor with the anticipation and hope of a live birth so they can say goodbye to their child.
Other times a woman will seek later aboriton when there is no adverse prenatal diagnosis, her life is not at risk, and there’s no medical emergency involved. This could be instead because she struggled with the decision to abort, she had a major change in life circumstances unrelated to medical issues, she struggled to get the time and money to get an abortion sooner, and/or she didn’t realize she was pregnant sooner. (More discussion here.)
Typically when a woman seeks a peri- or post-viability abortion on an otherwise healthy fetus, the abortion provider will induce fetal demise prior to inducing labor, most commonly by injecting feticide into the child’s heart, brain, or the amniotic fluid, less commonly by cutting the umbilical cord and waiting for the child to bleed out. These methods make a “failed” abortion ie a live birth very rare in cases of aborting healthy post-viable fetuses.
Still, given thousands of 21+ week abortions per year, mistakes can happen. And if a very premature baby is born with no prior adverse prenatal diagnoses to people who were just intending the child’s death, it’s not hard to see the conflations and perverse incentives when the people in the room are deciding whether to provide life-saving measures.
2) There are distinctions between prenatal diagnoses with different levels of severity.
There are some conditions where the child was highly unlikely to survive until birth in any case, and even less likely to survive long after. But there are other conditions where survivability is more variable. Even with Trisomy 13 and Trisomy 18, survival rates vary enormously depending on whether medical teams choose to provide similar interventions that they would to newborns with similar conditions (e.g. heart issues) but without trisomies.
[Read more – Medical community, ableism, and Trisomy 18]
There are also problems with inaccurate estimations of gestational age, inaccurate prenatal testing, false positive rates, etc, that could mean that an early induction of labor results in a live birth of a child who is a little more “compatible with life” than the parents or abortion provider anticipated. How are people making decisions about when to offer comfort care versus when to try to help babies survive?
3) There are distinctions between actively killing a child (imagery Trump brings to mind when he uses words like “execute”) and withholding potentially life-saving interventions from a child.
I would love to tell you that actively killing babies is never a part of this. I do believe it is exceedingly rare. But you need look no further than the (absolutely horrifying) grand jury report for the Kermit Gosnell case to see how (so-called) abortion providers and their staff can convince themselves that certain ethical distinctions (e.g. difference between injecting poison into a late-stage fetal heart versus snipping that minutes-later now-born child’s spinal cord) are not enormous, or apparently even that compelling.
[Read more – Is Gosnell America’s “Biggest Serial Killer”?]
Nevertheless, most of the discussion of “after-birth abortion” is, I think, really about fears that abortion providers have perverse incentives to exaggerate degrees of “incompatible with life” and withhold life-saving interventions in the rare cases when a child is born alive after abortion by mistake.
Are there a bunch of sociopathic providers “executing” otherwise healthy infants born alive after premature induction of labor? No.
But are these “failed abortion” cases limited to intended live births of babies with fatal anomalies so parents can say goodbye? Also no.
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