ABortion: Neither Safe Nor Rare

Regarding my recent posts on Dr. Gosnell's hideous abortion mill uncovered in Pennsylvania, an anonymous comment has left a couple of comments to which I wanted to reply (here andhere).  However, my reply has become so long it is a series of posts, so that's what I am doing with it.  I've posted parts one and two.  This is three.  Part four will go up Thursday night.

Anonymous: With regards to places and costs of late-term abortions, I remember reading after the murder of George Tiller, how he was one of 3 providers of legal abortions after the 21st week. I know that there is another provider in Nebraska. So it is not a matter of taking a bus to find a provider for the service; there are simply not many safe legal providers of this type of legal abortion. Also, this cost is typical of a late-term abortion because the procedure is more complicated later in gestation. 

What you read, to be blunt, was a lie.
Consider NOT taking the pro-choice media's word for it next time.  They do have an agenda, and decreasing the number of abortions performed is not part of that agenda.

Here are the facts they don't want you to know:

A 2008 study, "Abortion in the United States: Incidence and Access to Services, 2005," released by the Guttmacher Institute (which was originally founded as a special research affiliate of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America) found that, in 2005, there were at least 1,787 abortion providers in the United States. (It is worth noting that submission for the Guttmacher study is voluntary. As a result, Guttmacher projects estimates for non-responders meaning that the figures cited are estimated calculations and therefore most likely represent minimum numbers and calculations.)

Of the 1,787 providers, the study found that "[t]wenty percent of providers offered abortions after 20 weeks [LMP--Last Menstrual Period], and only 8% at 24 weeks [LMP]…" This translates to at least 300 abortion providers who will perform abortions after 20 weeks LMP, of whom 140 are willing to perform abortions at 24 weeks LMP.

Assuming that the 8% of abortion providers willing to perform abortions at 24 weeks LMP would do so at 22 weeks LMP means that there are at least 140 abortion providers willing to abort a pain-capable unborn children at 22 weeks LMP (20 weeks postfertilization).

"That more than 140 abortion providers are willing to kill unborn children who are capable of feeling the excruciating pain of abortion is a tragedy – a tragedy that we can easily stop in the state legislatures," NRLC Director of State Legislation Mary Spaulding Balch commented.

It is also misleading to conclude that the abortions which Hern, Carhart and their ilk are performing are "rare." According to a May 2010 briefing by the Guttmacher Institute, 1.5% of the estimated more than 1.2 million elective abortions performed annually in the United States are on unborn children at 21 weeks LMP (19 weeks postfertilization) or older. This translates to roughly 18,000 abortions annually – a substantial number of which probably occur at 22 weeks LMP or later, which is past the point that the best evidence indicates that the unborn child is fully capable of feeling pain (a point that may well occur earlier).

Carhart was the other provider in Nebraska you are thinking of.  He moved to Maryland where the abortion laws were more liberal, because Nebraska did the right thing and passed a law banning elective abortions after 20 weeks, when it is irrefutable that the children feel pain. As of last year he was setting up three clinics, in Maryland, near D.C.,  in Council Bluffs, Iowa (just across the river from Omaha, Nebraska, so his Nebraska clients still have just as much access to him as they ever did),  and in Indianapolis.

  He says he is going to be aborting to the maximum the law allows.  This does not sound like he thinks late term abortions are rare or uncommon.

Rashbaum was another one late term abortion provider a few years ago:

"When New York became the first state to legalize abortion in 1970, it coincided with Rashbaum’s split from his first wife, with whom he had two children, a son, now 43, and a daughter, now 45. With the mounting divorce costs, including many therapy bills, Rashbaum began performing abortions in New York City, which had quickly become the abortion capital of the country. The clinic where he worked was open round the clock, with three sets of doctors and nurses each taking eight-hour shifts. He says, "You would go home with a g[taking the Lord's name in vain expurgated] barrel of money."

More about him here, in a story that attempts to slant their reporting to be positive about what a sweetheart the old ruffian is.  I found him repugnant, chilling, and chauvinistic.  

In the nineties, Dr. Haskell was operating three abortion clinics where he performed 'partial birth abortions,' and he admitted that 80 percent of his late term abortions ( 20-24 weeks) were purely elective reasons.  If you click through the link you will find more reports from other doctors who were performing late term abortions using partial birth abortion technique, and who admitted that the vast majority of the babies they killed died for purely elective reasons.

Dr. Robert Bingham was briefly in the news a couple months ago.  He is another late-term abortion provider who has been skirting the laws in his state by giving his patients medication to begin contractions and dialate the cervix and then he has them drive to his other clinic in the next state over (sixty miles).  He actually has around a dozen clinics in four states where he does this with other doctors.  Only he got in trouble because he and his partners perforated a teenager's uterus and ripped her bowel. He didn't call an ambulance, her put her in his car and took her to the hospital, the practice of Rashbaum, too, and the biased author of that article (linked above a couple paragraphs) tried to frame that as something for which he should be admired.  But, in fact, that denies possibly life-saving medical treatment to the patient who may be dying of internal injuries. it protects the abortion doctor, not the patient.  This hospital saw things as they were, and called the police on Bingham.  They found 35 frozen, aborted babies and baby parts in the freezer in his office, but they could not find any medical records for 33 of those abortions. 

  He was recruited as an abortion doctor by Planned Parenthood in the first place.

The National ABortion Federation defended him when the New Jersey board first tried to take away his license twenty years ago, but now that same NAF says his record is the most egregious one they know of.  Well, that was before the story of Gosnell hit the news- and, oddly enough, NAF knew about Gosnell already when they were saying that Bingham was the worst they knew of.

By the way-  at a National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar, at least seven abortion providers admitted that when they perforate a uterus and pull the bowel through the hole, they just stuff it back, give medication to cause the uterus to contract, and hope for the best, sending the woman home without ever telling her what has been done to her.  These were medical doctors in good standing with the NAF.  They admitted this is what they did at an NAF meeting, yet so far as I know, nobody turned them in.  Keeping women safe?  I really don't see any reason to believe that.

According to National Right To Life:

In 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute collected questionnaires from 1,900 women in the United States who came to clinics to have abortions. Of the 1,900 questioned, 420 had been pregnant for 16 or more weeks. These 420 women were asked to choose among a list of reasons they had not obtained the abortions earlier in their pregnancies. The results were as follows:

71% Woman didn't recognize she was pregnant or misjudged gestation 48% Woman found it hard to make arrangements for abortion 33% Woman was afraid to tell her partner or parents 24% Woman took time to decide to have an abortion 8% Woman waited for her relationship to change 8% Someone pressured woman not to have abortion 6% Something changed after woman became pregnant 6% Woman didn't know timing is important 5% Woman didn't know she could get an abortion 2% A fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy 11% Other

Late term abortions are neither as rare as you imagine, as difficult to get as you suppose, or generally performed for those hard case reasons. 

 Insofar as it might be harder to find a doctor willing to do them than it is to find a doctor willing to murder babies at only six weeks gestation, that is because after 20 weeks the baby looks exactly like what she is, a human child, innocent, undeserving of death, and viable.  If the doctors know this and so do not wish to participate in those murders, there is no way you can ensure that late term abortions will be available in every small community and town without violating the conscience of the doctors or permitting them to be performed by people without a medical license (which is something Planned Parenthood has pushed for).

Finally, as for the imagined scarcity of late term abortion providers in the area:

The National Abortion Federation lists five member facilities in Philadelphia.

Right across the river into New Jersey, NAF lists two member facilities in Cherry Hill. Down in Maryland they list 8 within reasonable driving distance of the greater Philadelphia area. Delaware has 4. The District of Columbia has two. That's 21 NAF members alone purveying abortions in that area.

Tomorrow (Thursday night)- why doesn't the pro-choice side fight more actively for its beliefs?  Or do they?  Depends on what you think their beliefs are...