A recent Planned Parenthood Action Fund blog post claimed that the phrase “late-term abortion” is “pure anti-abortion propaganda” intended to “shame people who have abortions.” Except, there is plenty of evidence that abortionists perform abortions on healthy women carrying healthy babies despite the corporation’s claims.
In September, Melissa Block of National Public Radio spoke with Dr. Diane Horvath and Morgan Nuzzo about their plans to open Partners in Abortion Care, an all-trimester abortion clinic in Maryland.
“When it opens sometime after Labor Day, Partners in Abortion Care will be one of only a handful of clinics in the United States that offer abortions into the third trimester — in this case, up to 34 weeks’ gestation. A full-term pregnancy typically lasts 40 weeks,” the NPR report reads.
During the interview, Horvath and Nuzzo say that they expect to treat ten people each week. The article cites various reasons why women seek abortions later in pregnancy, acknowledging that many do so because they didn’t discover they were pregnant until after the first trimester.
An April 2022 study titled “Is third-trimester abortion exceptional? Two pathways to abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy in the United States,” authored by abortion advocate Katrina Kimport, profiled women who had abortions at 24 weeks or later. According to the study, while some women aborted due to a fetal abnormality, others sought abortions due to a lack of resources to obtain an earlier one or because they didn’t know they were pregnant until later.
Curiously, the Planned Parenthood blog post appears to acknowledge that some women do obtain abortions later in pregnancy due to an inability to obtain one earlier. The post defends such abortions by blaming pro-life lawmakers for crafting abortion bans and creating barriers that delay “access to abortion care.”
It’s also worth noting that the phrase “late-term abortion” is not used exclusively by pro-lifers. Abortionist LeRoy Carhart’s CARE (Clinics for Abortion and Reproductive Excellence) uses the phrase on its webpage advertising the fact that it commits abortions after 27 weeks of pregnancy.
Another abortionist, Curtis Boyd, used the term in a 2017 interview with NMPoliticalReport, which he posted on the website for his Southwestern Women’s Options clinic in New Mexico. And as The Daily Camera reported in 2015 about abortionist Warren Hern, “he also performs late abortions for women who are not facing any grave medical outcome.”
Some abortionists have even admitted to lying on the paperwork about the health risks used to justify a later-term abortion.
Take, for example, the case involving 23-year-old Keisha Atkins, who was six months pregnant when she sought an abortion. Atkins died due to complications from the abortion, and her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit.
Video footage of Shannon Carr’s deposition shows that the abortionist merely speculated that the pregnancy would cause Atkins “substantial and irreversible harm to her physical health, her mental health, her family health, her safety and well-being.”
It’s an outright lie for Planned Parenthood to claim that late-term abortions are a myth, and Reprotection will continue exposing the abortion industry’s efforts to hide the truth from the public.