Reply: Abortion to remove a fetus after viability is stillbirth
[This article is a transcript of “Reply: Abortion to remove a Fetus After Viability is Stillbirth” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
Video also available on TikTok.
We seem to be seeing an uptick in comments like this: the idea is that there is no such thing as “abortion” after viability because at that point it’s just induction of labor with the intent and the result of a live birth. This is a pleasant fiction.
There is such a thing as abortion after viability, and by that I mean a procedure with the intent and result of a dead child, and no, they are not all done because the woman’s life is in danger or because the child had some sort of fatal fetal abnormality. You can read this study, which is open access and talks about post-viability abortions of healthy fetuses carried by healthy women, and the procedures are legal and they are intentional. You can also go here to see further evidence.
But meanwhile, we have a specific example to show you today. New Mexico is one of a handful of states that have no gestational limits on abortion, and this is a story of a woman who found out she was pregnant at 31 weeks, and so her local clinic referred her to a clinic in New Mexico for her abortion.
Some people rightly point out that abortions this late in pregnancy cost upwards of $10,000, and so they argue that women aren’t going to get abortions this late unless it’s for some kind of medical emergency because it’s just too expensive to be worth it. That’s not actually true. There are abortion funds that will help pay for abortions this late in pregnancy, and this story talks about several of them.
But the story is also extremely clear that this is not labor induction at 31 weeks with the result of a live birth and a child in the NICU. She talks about how the first day of a multi-day procedure involves fetal euthanization injection. We’ve talked before about how providers will ensure fetal demise before extraction, and one way they might do that is to inject basically poison into the fetal heart or amniotic fluid.
As if to further underscore the point, this woman talks about how she cried and said over and over again, “I’m so sorry baby, even though I’ll never hold you in my arms, I will hold you forever in my heart.” This is not the reaction of someone who is about to birth a live child.
Similarly, she talks about how at one point she thought she might prefer to have the stillbirth in her hotel room, again underscoring the fact that there was no discussion of or expectation of a live birth.
It’s difficult to argue that this procedure is about bodily rights because the woman still has to go through labor and delivery all the same. It’s just that in this case she is delivering a dead child.
The woman talks about how she was in so much pain she thought her body might literally explode, and she also talks about pushes because she was going through labor, and she talks about how she couldn’t help but feel the size of the “pregnancy” she was passing, meaning the dead child.
She laments that she didn’t find out about her pregnancy sooner because then the abortion procedure would have been much more simple and much less traumatic. She says she never knew that she would have to euthanize, go into labor with, and fully deliver a viable fetus — her baby. She also talks about how even the people in her life who were supportive of her getting an abortion don’t want to hear about the details. This is not at all surprising.
We have found that the pleasant fiction that later abortions only exist for medical emergencies is one of the most persistent pro-choice myths out there, and the corollary that post-viability abortion is just live birth is also a myth.
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