Warren Hern, late term abortionist, on the abortions he performs. He does abortions up to 32 weeks and sometimes beyond at his clinic in Boulder:
“The generally accepted point of level viability is around 24-26 weeks. But you can’t take a given point in fetal development and apply that 100 percent of the time. It just doesn’t happen that way. If you look at premature deliveries and survival percentages at different weeks of gestation, you’ll get 24-week fetuses with some survival rate. The fact that you get some survivors demonstrates the difficulty in defining a point. ….
I don’t know that there is a typical second-trimester abortion. But if you look at the spectrum of abortions (most women are between the ages of 19 and 29) they tend to be younger. Some are older. The typical thing that happens with older women is that they never realize they were pregnant because they were continuing to bleed during the pregnancy. The other thing we see with older women is fetal malformations or Down’s Syndrome. These are being diagnosed much earlier now than they used to be. We’re seeing a lot of genetic diagnoses with ultrasound and amniocentesis at 17-18 weeks instead of 22-24 weeks. With the teenagers, anybody who has ever worked with or had teenagers can appreciate how unpredictable they can be at times. They have adult bodies, but a lot of times they don’t have adult minds. So their reaction to problems tends to get much more emotional than an adult’s might be.
It’s a question of maturity. So even though they may have been educated about all kinds of issues in reproductive health, when a teenager becomes pregnant, depending up on her relationship with her family, the amount of peer support she has–every one is a highly-individual case–sometimes they delay until they can no longer contain their problem and it finally comes out. Sometimes it’s money: It takes them a while to get the money. Sometimes its just denial….”
Discharging the Committee on the Judiciary from Further Consideration Of the President’s Veto of HR 1833, Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995 Can be found here.
So we see there are various reasons why late term abortions can be performed, and its interesting he did not cite a single case where abortion was needed to preserve a woman’s life or health. Does a baby with down syndrome really deserve to die?
This is what Dr. Hern does to babies at 23 weeks:
Below: ultrasound of baby between 22 and 24 weeks
Below: pieces of baby aborted at 20 weeks
