Former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explains:
“I often hear the argument [keeping] late-term abortion legal is necessary to save women’s lives in cases of life-threatening conditions that can and do arise in pregnancy.
Albany Medical Center where I worked for over seven years is a tertiary referral center that accepts patients with life-threatening conditions related to or caused by pregnancy. I personally treated hundreds of women with such conditions in my tenure there.
There are several serious conditions that can arise or worsen typically during the late second or third trimester of pregnancy that require immediate care. In many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the pregnancy, if you prefer, can be lifesaving. But is abortion a viable treatment option in this setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is not.
Before a suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must first be sufficiently dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished with serial placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a type of sterilized seaweed that absorbs water over several hours and swells to several times its original diameter.
Multiple placements of several laminaria at a time are absolutely required prior to attempting a suction D&E. In the mid-second trimester, this requires approximately 36 hours or more to accomplish. When performing later abortion procedures, cervical preparation can take up to three days or more.
In cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her pregnancy, 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. The patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe preeclampsia or toxemia. Her blood pressure at admission was 220/160.
As you are probably aware, 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 lifesaving 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 hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.”
Quoted in Adam Peters with Robert Alexander Pro-Choice Lies: How to Expose the Pro-Abortion Deception (Irvine, California: Renaissance Publishers, 2021) 36 – 37
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