They say that during Thursday’s debate with President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump lied about abortions done late in pregnancy.
One of the main issues that will shape this year’s presidential race is likely to be abortion.
Trump said the same things about late-term abortions on Thursday that he said about them in 2016 during a debate against Hillary Clinton, who was running for president at the time.
“They will kill a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth,” he said.
Late-in-pregnancy abortions happen at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that less than 1% of all abortions happen at this point in the pregnancy. More than 80% happen before or at nine weeks of pregnancy. Only 6% happen between 14 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, which is the second stage. Ending the life of a born baby is not what abortion means.
NBC News talked to Dr. Dara Kass, an emergency medicine doctor in New York and former regional head at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who said that any claim that it is is false.
She said, “What he’s talking about is murder, and that doesn’t happen when it comes to abortion.”
Donald Trump also said this about former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam: “He’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.”
In a 2019 interview, Northam was asked about a bill that was being considered by the state that would have removed a rule that said abortions in the second or third trimester had to happen in a hospital. It would have also gotten rid of the need for three doctors to agree that an abortion late in pregnancy is physically necessary.
Rather than having the law make this choice for them, Northam said he thought it should be up to the family and their doctor.
As Northam explained in the interview, third-trimester abortions are only done when both the mother and the doctor agree to them. They are also only done when the baby is severely deformed or can’t live on its own.
Jill Wieber Lens, a reproductive justice expert and law professor at the University of Iowa, said, “What Northam was talking about is a baby born with severe abnormalities. This is the kind of thing that a person learns about in the late stages of pregnancy.”
39 to 40 weeks is the length of a full-term pregnancy. If a woman who is late in her pregnancy starts to show signs of pre-eclampsia or other life-threatening conditions, doctors may decide to trigger labor. The chances of life are good, even if the baby is born very early (less than 28 weeks). It’s not abortion to do this, and it’s considered murder if a healthy baby is killed after being born this way.
Often, tests don’t show such serious problems until much later in the pregnancy. Also, pregnant women may not know there are serious issues with their health or the health of the baby until then. According to statistics from the CDC, the number of women who either didn’t get any prenatal care during their pregnancy or didn’t get it until the third trimester (between the seventh and ninth months) rose to a record high of nearly 7% in 2021.
A doctor and the family of a baby that isn’t expected to live may need to talk about things like, “Should we do life support if it’s ultimately pointless?” Wieber Lens was talking about perinatal hospice. Northam wasn’t talking about abortion; he was talking about how to take care of kids that can’t live on their own.
Wieber Lens said she thinks more families will have to make decisions about prenatal hospice, especially in states that don’t have exceptions to abortion laws for birth defects.
Problems can make it necessary to make tough choices.
An email from SBA Pro-Life America to NBC News said, “Most late-term abortions are voluntary and are done on healthy women with healthy babies for the same reasons given for first-trimester abortions.”
When asked to explain what “late-stage abortions” really mean, SBA Pro-Life America said that anything after 15 weeks is considered a “late-term abortion.”
“Late term” in medicine means that the pregnancy is past 41 weeks, which is past full term.
Many abortions that happen in the second trimester, which is from 13 to 27 weeks of pregnancy, are probably not physically necessary, that much is true.
She is an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on abortion law. “You will still see a lot of abortions for reasons like finding out you were pregnant late, a partner losing their job, or someone having a really hard time deciding whether to terminate or not,” she said.
She also said that people may have trouble getting an abortion, which could force them to make the choice later in the pregnancy when they can finally get one.
“States have made it so hard to get an abortion early in the pregnancy,” Wieber Lens said. “That’s one reason why many abortions happen after 12 weeks.”
There are times when abortions after 12 weeks are medically important.
A test done on Donley when she was 20 weeks pregnant showed that her son had a major brain problem that was stopping his brain tissue from forming. Donley was already at a high risk for having a baby because she had cancer. Donley had an abortion when she was 22 weeks pregnant, which was a hard choice.
She said, “It was terrible.”
Abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy are very rare, very expensive, and are usually only done when the doctor says the baby is likely to die. Even in places that don’t have laws against abortion, Donley said it can be hard to find a doctor who will do one at this point.
Weeks 29 through 40, or months seven, eight, and nine of pregnancy, make up the third trimester. “We are almost exclusively talking about a majority are medically necessary abortions,” Donley said.
Vyas, an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and director of the school’s MPH Maternal and Child Health program, said that these abortions “almost always happen because of complications such as fetal anomalies or a medical condition in which the woman’s life is in danger.” “There are a lot of complex medical reasons for this, ranging from birth defects to genetic issues.” Most of these conditions can’t happen earlier in the pregnancy.
