(LifeSiteNews) — As Democrats, the abortion lobby, and their allies in the mainstream media work intently to make Americans believe that late-term abortions are a myth, an admission to the contrary has appeared in an unusual source: the left-wing Washington Post.
On September 20, the Post published an op-ed by columnist Kathleen Parker lamenting that, over the course of the current presidential campaign and its focus on state abortion bans, “we’ve heard little to nothing about the nine states and the District of Columbia that allow abortion no matter what the age of the fetus.”
“We don’t like to hear about these procedures because they complicate a preferred understanding that late-term abortions never happen unless some genetic or other physical anomaly would condemn the child to a life of misery and/or early death,” Parker writes. “Democrats bent on restoring [abortion-on-demand] would have us believe that no state would allow a fully formed baby to be aborted, and it is rational to believe this. But such is not always the case. In fact, a doctor profiled in a 2023 Atlantic article, Warren Hern, performs abortions up to 32 weeks and sometimes later. Hern estimated that about half of his later-term abortions are of healthy babies.”
Acknowledging that she prefers “encouraging education over judicial fiat as the best way of reducing abortion,” Parker notes that the abortion lobby opposes even this much, even though “[m]ost doctors wouldn’t remove a gall bladder with as little information as many abortion providers are willing to offer their clients. Are they afraid a woman might change her mind based on a better understanding of what is about to be done?”
She goes on to note that Hern has committed late-term abortions simply because the mother wanted a child of a different sex, tolerated in part by “abortion culture [having] had the undesirable, if predictable, effect of making us less horrified by worse and worse.”
“At 27 weeks, the last week of the second trimester, the fetus’s brain is active, sleeping and waking – eyes wide open – on a regular schedule,” she notes. “Lungs are incomplete, but he or she could survive outside the mother’s body even earlier. This is no matter to the nine states and the District of Columbia.”
Parker’s column sharply rebukes the dominant narrative that late-term abortions are never sought or committed for anything but the most extreme extenuating circumstances, a key talking point to sustain the Democratic Party and abortion lobby’s opposition to any and all abortion restrictions, even late-term bans that contain exceptions for the so-called “hard cases” they use to justify their stance.
In any case, direct abortion – the destruction of an innocent unborn baby – is always gravely immoral and never needed nor justifiable, including for alleged “anomalies,” for which a fatally ill child could be treated with palliative care rather than brutally murdered.
As LifeSiteNews extensively reviewed last month, more than 50,000 abortions a year take place after 15 weeks (almost four months into pregnancy), and approximately 10,000 take place after 20 weeks (five months). Further, a 2013 report by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute admitted “data suggests that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment,” and Hern’s own published data found that “fetal abnormalities” ranged from just a fifth to a third of his patients – and that the most common of those “abnormalities” was Down syndrome, a condition that is neither a death sentence nor even a guarantee of an unhappy life.
While pro-life laws have reduced the number of surgical abortions in the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the abortion lobby has also been working feverishly to cancel out the deterrent effects of pro-life laws by legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, placing abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states havens for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions, and, most effectively, the proliferation of abortion pills across state lines.