A reporter at the Washington Post is recorded saying:
“I didn’t know it at the time, of course, and maybe the people who supplied my data — the usual pro-choice groups — were giving me what they thought was precise information. And precise I was. I wrote that “just four one-hundredths of one percent of abortions are performed after 24 weeks” and that “most, if not all, are performed because the fetus is found to be severely damaged or because the life of the mother is clearly in danger.”
It turns out, though, that no one really knows what percentage of abortions are late-term. No one keeps figures. But my Washington Post colleague David Brown looked behind the purported figures and the purported rationale for these abortions and found something other than medical crises of one sort or another. After interviewing doctors who performed late-term abortions and surveying the literature, Brown — a physician himself — wrote: “These doctors say that while a significant number of their patients have late abortions for medical reasons, many others — perhaps the majority — do not.”…In the latter stages of pregnancy, the word abortion does not quite suffice; we are talking about the killing of the fetus — and, too often, not for any urgent medical reason.”
Richard Cohen “A New Look at Late-Term Abortion: A Rigid Refusal to Even Consider Society’s Interest in the Matter that Endangers Abortion Rights” Washington Post Sept 24,1996
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