The New York Times published comments from a doctor disputing Donald Trump’s comments on late term abortion in the presidential debate Wednesday, but the story ignores some key facts.
“You can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day,” Trump said in the debate, as he was outlining his position against late term abortions. Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton said a woman should be allowed to abort up until the baby is born.
The New York Times talked to a doctor who called Trump’s comments “absurd,” because women rarely if ever choose to abort in the final days of a pregnancy. When they do, the doctor says, it’s usually because the woman finds out the fetus is unlikely to survive after birth, or because the fetus endangers her life.
Here is the crux of the doctor’s argument from the article:
“If, very late in pregnancy, a fetus was found to be nonviable — to have a condition that would not allow it to survive after birth — the woman might continue the pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby, or she might decide not to continue the pregnancy, Dr. [Aaron B.] Caughey said.
‘Would you call that an abortion?’ he said. ‘I think most of us wouldn’t use that language. We would say induction of labor for a nonviable pregnancy.'”
In fact what Caughey is describing is an abortion. Induction of labor is a common method used in third trimester abortions in which the abortionist injects a drug into the fetus’s brain with a needle. The drug induces a fatal heart attack that renders the child stillborn.
And the “nonviable pregnancy” he refers to is an unborn baby.
Caughey’s point that late term abortions are rare does not change the fact that a woman can legally have her child aborted in the last few days of her pregnancy in a number of states. And neither his comments nor the article address how a third term abortion is carried out.
Caughey declined to elaborate on his comments to The Daily Caller News Foundation, or to describe methods used in late term abortion procedures.
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