As I wrote earlier today, Democrats across the country are in the middle of a mad dash to legalize late-term abortion. Already legal in six states plus Washington, D.C., New York was added to the list last week, and now Rhode Island and Virginia may be next.
In fact, the governor of Virginia thinks the law should go even further. He appeared on a local radio station this morning and advocated for killing babies after birth. Keep in mind: Governor Northam is supposed to be a moderate Democrat. We are apparently reaching the point where the moderate squishes of the Democrat Party endorse the summary execution of newborns. What will the radicals support? Carpet bombing daycare centers?
But the Left is not quite ready, as a whole, to openly jump on Northam’s infanticide bandwagon. That day will come, probably soon, but not yet. In the meantime, they will simply lie and claim that Northam didn’t say what he clearly said. They’ll say that his words were misconstrued and he was really just talking about a normal abortion procedure. Or, according to one Leftist, he was discussing “end of life care” — which is the creepiest euphemism for abortion I’ve yet heard.
This is what abortion advocates do. They lie. They lie with total abandon and no remorse. And why not? You’ve already sacrificed your soul by defending baby murder, no reason to get squeamish about a few little fibs here and there. The problem is that they lie so often and so consistently that it begins to absorb into the national conscience. One of the biggest lies about abortion, and one that apparently has sunk into the minds of a lot of ignorant and susceptible people, is that these late-term abortion laws in New York and elsewhere are necessary to “protect the life of the mother.”
This is false on two counts. First, the New York law, just like the Virginia law if it is passed, does not stipulate that late-term abortions be reserved only for the sake of preserving the mother’s life. Rather, it stipulates life and health. The courts have already determined that “health” can mean pretty much anything — physical health, emotional health, mental health, etc. It is an “exception” that excludes no one and includes everyone.
Second, and this is the crucial fact, abortion is never necessary to protect the life of the mother. In the whole history of human civilization there has never been one case where a baby had to be directly killed in order to save a woman’s life.*
Dr. Anthony Levantino, a former abortionist, explained this fact in testimony to Congress a few years ago:
In cases where a pregnancy places a woman in danger of death or grave physical injury, a doctor more often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less 72 hours, to resolve the problem. Let me illustrate with a real-life case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Center. A patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe pre-eclampsia or toxemia. Her blood pressure on admission was 220/160. A normal blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn child. She could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke.
This case was managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by Cesarean section. She and her baby did well.
This is a typical case in the world of high-risk obstetrics. In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in providing appropriate, truly life-saving care. During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by “terminating” pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.
Abortion is not only unnecessary but actually incurs extra risk and causes “dangerous delay.” As Dr. Levantino explained, it may well be necessary to end a pregnancy early. But in the third trimester, “ending a pregnancy early” will always mean delivering the baby. Even with an abortion, there will still be a delivery. The baby does not just disappear. If the woman chooses an abortion, then the child will have to be given a lethal injection prior to delivery. If she chooses life, then the child will be delivered without the lethal injection. In no scenario could that lethal injection to the baby somehow save the woman’s life. It could, however, put her life in greater danger.
Various OB/GYNs, nurses, and doctors have spoken out in recent weeks and echoed this point. Dr. Omar Hamada had this to say on Facebook:
I want to clear something up so that there is absolutely no doubt.
I’m a Board Certified OB/GYN who has delivered over 2,500 babies.
There’s not a single fetal or maternal condition that requires third trimester abortion. Not one. Delivery, yes. Abortion, no.
There is absolutely no medical reason to kill a near term or term infant. For any reason.
The testimony of these medical professionals has the added benefit of making sense. Even we non-doctors can understand that you don’t need to stab a baby with a poison needle in order to remove it from the womb. You don’t need a medical degree to see why you aren’t going to save a mother’s life by poisoning her baby.
But, as I said, abortion advocates are liars. Abortion doctors are especially liars, which is why an abortionist went viral on Twitter a few days ago explaining why late-term abortion is indeed sometimes “necessary.” Just read her argument, though, and you can easily see the problem.
She rattles off a whole list of alleged real world scenarios where killing the baby was “medically necessary.” Except that even in those cases — which, presumably, were the best she could offer — the abortion was clearly not medically necessary at all. She mentions several instances where the baby was going to die anyway. That might be true, but it doesn’t follow that killing him was necessary to save the mother’s life. That’s an argument (a bad argument) that the abortion was justified, not that it was necessary.
In the other cases she stipulates that the mother didn’t want a C-section. Translation: the baby could have survived with a C-section but the mother preferred an abortion. So her definitive, drop-the-mic examples of medically-necessary abortions are actually examples of personally preferred abortions. There is, of course, a big difference between the two. To conflate them is to lie. Which pro-aborts clearly have no problem doing.
*Note: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) disagrees with this claim, maintaining that late-term abortion may be necessary when “complications severely compromise a woman’s health or life,” including “premature rupture of membranes and infection, preeclampsia, placental abruption, and placenta accreta.”