Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams defended abortion through all nine months of pregnancy using an already-debunked claim by the abortion industry and its allies that women seek late-term abortions due to some “traumatic experience.”
“There is no example of a woman – you’ve gone through the trouble of buying a crib and naming that child – there is no one who wakes up and says at eight months, never mind,” Abrams said last week on ABC’s The View, elaborating:
It is usually a traumatic experience, a difficult, if not heart-wrenching, decision, and to minimize it by allowing politicians to tell you what you are doing and what you are feeling when the doctor that delivers this news to you should be the arbiter, along with the woman who has to make that choice.
“So, I don’t think there’s anyone who says there should not be a limit,” the Democrat candidate added, “but the limit should not be made by politicians who don’t understand basic biology, or apparently basic morality.”
Following the nomination of now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall of 2020, a video of a May 2019 Fox News town hall event, featuring former Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, now Biden secretary of transportation, “resurfaced” and went viral.
Abortion advocates became giddy over Buttigieg’s response to the question, “Do you believe, at any point in pregnancy, that there should be any limit on a woman’s right to an abortion?”
Abrams’ response on The View is nearly a mirror-image to that of the failed presidential candidate’s response over three years ago.
After stating less than one percent of abortions occur in the third trimester of pregnancy, Buttigieg said:
So, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition you’ve been expecting to carry it to term.
We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen the name, women who have purchased the crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice.
“That decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made,” Buttigieg said.
The abortion industry and its allies in the media and politics – and now Abrams – have been making the “fetal anomaly” or “severe health issue of the woman” claim for decades.
It was abortionists themselves, however, who first called the claim false, and Live Action President Lila Rose noted the comments of former executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, Ron Fitzsimmons, who even acknowledged partial birth abortions were not exactly rare, according to a 1997 report in the Los Angeles Times.
"The majority of these procedures [late-term abortions] are performed… on healthy women and healthy fetuses." – Ron Fitzsimmons, Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers https://t.co/S8IiG32gr9
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) February 6, 2019
“The abortion rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it and so, probably, does everyone else,” Fitzsimmons stated, revealing he had “lied through [his] teeth” during a Nightline interview when he himself said partial-birth abortions were rare and only performed as a result of fetal anomalies and serious health risks to the mother.
Similarly, infamous Kansas abortionist George Tiller told attendees at the 1995 National Abortion Federation conference about his experience with late-term abortions.
“About 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks, and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past five years,” Tiller said.
His statement indicates only about 8 percent of his late-term abortion patients terminated their pregnancies because their babies were diagnosed with a prenatal diagnosis, or “fetal anomaly.”
In January 2019, Live Action News’ LiveAction.org cited a 2011 RenewAmerica column by former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline who noted Tiller would agree to perform abortions for “mental health reasons,” including to prevent the mother from having to hire a babysitter, or so they could attend a prom or concert.
In 2013, abortion advocacy group the Guttmacher Institute released a study that found women seeking both first-trimester and late-term abortions provided the same reasons for delaying the procedure, including “not knowing about the pregnancy,” “trouble deciding about the abortion,” and “disagreeing about the abortion with the man involved.”
The study’s researchers concluded that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”
The American Life League (ALL) observed in August 2021 that defending elective abortions throughout all of pregnancy to support cases of endangerment to the mother’s life is “the most deceptive argument for aborting a child that exists today.”
In the Supreme Court’s Doe v. Bolton decision in 1973, the Court defined a “health of the mother” abortion.
Justice Harry Blackmun asserted in the majority opinion the abortionist’s medical judgment regarding the mother’s health may be “exercised in the light of all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the well-being of the patient.”
However, in a fact sheet regarding late-term abortion prepared by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, perinatologist Byron Calhoun, M.D., stated, “There is never a reason to take the life of an unborn child since there is no maternal condition that requires the death of the fetus to save her life.”
“The infant may need to be delivered prematurely and die as a result of that, but it is not necessary to take the infant’s life,” Calhoun explained. “Further, if a fetus has an adverse prenatal diagnosis all patients should be offered perinatal hospice care since this is far better for maternal health than any elective abortion. Perinatal hospice allows the parents to be parents and provide all the love they can for their child.”
Abrams also defended elective abortion at any time during pregnancy with the claim, “the limit should not be made by politicians who don’t understand basic biology,” an ironic comment coming from the Democrat, considering it is her party that now consistently denies biology, attempting to make it subservient to gender identity.
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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Stacey Abrams” by The View.
