Former President Donald Trump made false claims about late-stage abortions during Thursday’s debate with President Joe Biden, according to experts.
Abortion is poised to become one of the most important issues defining this year’s presidential election.
On Thursday, during a debate with then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Trump repeated claims he made in 2016 about late-stage abortions.
He claimed: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
Late pregnancy abortions, by definition, take place during or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1% of all abortions occur at this stage of pregnancy. More than 80% occur during or before nine weeks of pregnancy, and only 6% occur between 14 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, during the second trimester. Abortion is not about ending the life of a born baby.
Any claim that this is so is incorrect, Dr. Dara Kass, a New York emergency room physician and former regional director at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NBC News.
“What he’s talking about is murder, and it’s not happening in connection with abortion,” she said.
Trump also specifically targeted the former governor of Virginia. Ralph Noordamwhich states, “He is willing, as we say, to tear the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.”
In a 2019 interview, Northam was pressed about proposed state legislation that would have removed a restriction requiring second- or third-trimester abortions to be performed in a hospital. It also would have removed a requirement that three doctors agree that an abortion late in pregnancy is medically necessary.
Northam said he agreed that this decision should be made between families and their doctor, rather than there being a law that made that decision for them.
“When we talk about abortions in the third trimester, they are done with the consent of the mother and the doctor, and this happens in cases where there may be serious deformities, there may be a fetus that is not viable,” said Northam in the interview. .
Jill Wieber Lens, a law professor at the University of Iowa and an expert on reproductive justice, said: “What Northam was talking about is a baby being born with serious defects, the kind of things that someone doesn’t learn about until very late in pregnancy.”
A full-term pregnancy lasts 39 to 40 weeks. If a woman begins to experience life-threatening symptoms such as preeclampsia late in pregnancy, doctors may initiate labor. Even if the baby is extremely premature (less than 28 weeks), the chances of survival are good. This induction is not an abortion, and if a healthy baby is killed after being born this way, it is infanticide, experts say.
Often, tests don’t reveal such serious complications until later in pregnancy, or pregnant women don’t know there are serious problems with the fetus — or their own health — until then. In fact, the number of women who didn’t receive prenatal care during pregnancy or didn’t receive prenatal care until the third trimester — between the seventh and ninth months — rose to a record of nearly 7% in 2021, according to CDC data.
If a fetus is not expected to live, a doctor and a family may need to have conversations such as, “Do we do life support if it is ultimately futile?” said Wieber Lens, referring to perinatal hospice. “Northam wasn’t talking about abortion, he was talking about how we care for non-viable babies.”
Wieber Lens expects that more families will now face choices when it comes to perinatal hospice care, especially in states that do not have exceptions to abortion laws for birth defects.
Complications may require difficult decisions
In an emailed statement to NBC News, a representative from SBA Pro-Life America said: “Most late-term abortions are elective and are performed on healthy women with healthy babies for the same reasons given for first-trimester abortions. ”
When pressed to define late-term abortions, for which there is no technical definition, SBA Pro-Life America said it classifies “late-term abortion” as anything after 15 weeks.
Medically speaking, “late term” is a phrase that describes pregnancy after 41 weeks, which is beyond full term.
It’s true that a significant number of abortions that occur during the second trimester — which lasts 13 to 27 weeks of pregnancy — are likely not medically necessary, experts say.
“You’re still going to see a significant number of abortions for reasons like late detection of a pregnancy, or maybe a partner has lost a job, or someone has had a really hard time making a choice about whether or not to have a termination,” he says. Greer Donleyassociate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, and an expert on abortion law.
People may also have difficulty accessing an abortion, leaving the decision until later in pregnancy when they can finally access it, she said.
“Part of the reason abortions are happening later, after 12 weeks, is because states have made it so difficult to get abortions early in pregnancy,” Wieber Lens said.
In some cases, abortions after 12 weeks are considered medically necessary.
Donley was 20 weeks pregnant when a test showed her son had a serious brain defect that prevented brain tissue from forming. As a cancer survivor, Donley’s pregnancy was already high-risk. When she was 22 weeks pregnant, Donley made the difficult decision to have an abortion.
“It was devastating,” she said.
Abortions during the third trimester of pregnancy are rare, expensive and usually performed when a life-threatening diagnosis has been made. It is also often difficult to find a doctor who can perform an abortion at this stage, even in states without abortion bans, Donley said.
In the third trimester, which includes weeks 29 through 40 — or months seven, eight and nine of pregnancy — “we’re almost exclusively talking about a majority of medically necessary abortions,” Donley said.
These abortions “almost always result from complications such as fetal abnormalities or a medical condition that puts the woman’s life at risk,” said Amita Vyas, an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and director of the university. MPH Maternal and Child Health Program. “There are so many different nuanced medical reasons, from different birth defects to genetic things that come up. Most of these diagnoses cannot occur earlier in pregnancy.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
