Society of Family Planning: how to induce fetal asystole (baby heart attack)
[This article is a transcript of “Why do abortion providers need to ‘induce fetal asystole’?” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
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Have you ever had a pro-choice person tell you that there’s no such thing as abortion after viability or in the third trimester?
Some of them will say we’re just confused because all that is is giving birth. The idea is that the purpose of abortion is just to end a pregnancy, not to kill anything, and so if the baby is viable when they end the pregnancy, then the baby is born.
In related news, the Society of Family Planning just came out with clinical recommendations for the induction of fetal asystole before abortion. That means “how do you get the baby’s heart to stop before you remove them from the mother?”
They explain that, “insufficient evidence exists to recommend routine induction of fetal asystole before previable medication and procedural abortion”; you don’t need to stop the baby’s heart before viability because they can’t survive anyway. “However, at periviable gestations and after fetal viability, inducing fetal asystole before abortion prevents the infrequent but serious occurrence of unanticipated expulsion of a fetus with cardiorespiratory activity”; if you are near or after viability and you don’t induce a heart attack, the baby might accidentally be born alive.
They go on to explain that abortion providers should decide their pharmaceutical agent of choice, i.e., poison. They talk about potassium chloride, lidocaine, and digoxin: “To establish asystole rapidly, we recommend the use of potassium chloride.” That makes sense. That is the exact same pharmaceutical agent we use for lethal injection in death penalty cases.
They do have one caution. They say don’t use potassium chloride if you can’t make sure it can go into the baby’s heart or the umbilical cord, because then you “risk accidental administration to the pregnant individual.” Another helpful pro tip: “because digoxin may take several hours to induce asystole, an alternative agent should be considered in settings where fetal asystole must be confirmed rapidly.” In other words, if you’re in a hurry, digoxin is not your poison of choice because it takes hours to get the baby’s heart to stop.
Again, post-viability abortion is not just about inducing labor. It’s about inducing fetal demise first and then labor. The whole point is at the end of this process, you do not have a live child.
And if your response to all this is “well, they’re only doing this when there is a fatal fetal anomaly or the woman’s life is in danger and there’s no other choice,” that is not true. There’s tons of evidence to show it’s not true. We link to a whole bunch of it here. Go read it.
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