What are the medical reasons that might necessitate a post viability abortion?

[ballardfam]

@UDS

And, to complicate matters further, it’s possible that the clinical judgment required varies between jurisdictions. One state may permit an abortion, say, “where necessary to save the life” of the mother, and another “where continuation of the pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother”, which is not quite the same thing.

@gooftroopag

What exactly is the difference?

I think a practical application of this could be:

Pregnant woman has cancer and the only appropriate chemotherapy and the time frame to administer it is not consistent with pregnancy.

VS

Pregnant woman has cancer and the most effective chemotherapy cannot be given during pregnancy. A less effective chemotherapy may be given during pregnancy but there will be less chance of long term survival of the woman.

[mnemosyne]

Sometimes, termination of one or more of a set of multiples becomes the only option late in a pregnancy in order to ensure that the other(s) have a chance at survival. For example, an unhealthy twin with no chance at life could be aborted and removed from the womb, leaving the healthy twin more time to gestate and be born closer to/at full term. In such cases, it’s often the case that not aborting means the unhealthy twin dies anyways and/or is in the way/causes complications at term for a safe delivery of the healthy one.

[AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet]

A lot of post viabilty abortions are due to the fact that the baby has died in utero.
We have demonized abortion in this country. But even with medical advances there are still some abortions where the family tries to carry the baby to term, but the baby dies due to a gentic or other issue…heck it can happen with severe Down’s Syndrome or Turner’s syndrome too!

[md2000]

My stepmother, and her daughter, and then her granddaughter, had reccurrent flare-ups of kidney problems. Basically, at a certain point (Nobody shared significant details with me) the doctors told her “you’re having problems now (She was hospitalized) but as the baby gets bigger your kidneys will be even more stressed and will get worse, you simply will not last the whole 9 months.”

Since the problems come and go, she tried again but same result. She’s in her 90’s now so this was done when things were NOT lax over “endanger mother’s health” criteria; it obviously worked in terms of saving her life. As I said, they did not share deep details with me, but I assume a doctor would be able to say “if they function at X% at this stage, they won’t handle kidneying for two at 8 or 9 months”. Of course, contrary to the OP, I don’t believe these were late term but with unfortunate timing of her problem, it could have become that.

[Annie-Xmas]

@Ca3799

Also, viability is considered to be 24 weeks.

My specialty hospital has had a very small handful of survivors at the late 22 week range in the 14 years I have worked there but most people don’t deliver at a facility equipped to handle approximate 24 week gestation infants. Infants born at a non-specialty hospital in the micro-preemie range don’t tend to live long and if they do live, they generally suffer serious consequences such as interventricular hemorrhage (brain bleeds), necrotising enterocolitis (bowel death), and life and brain threatening respiratory distress of different types and infection since infants have poor immune systems. These are common problems of preemies.

While other, ‘smaller’ problems such as blindness (Stevie Wonder), deafness, mental retardation and cerebral palsy are survivable, some families don’t care for the odds of all of these risks.

One of the weirdest anti-abortion tracts I read stated that women should wait until 20 weeks to see if they have a miscarriage and are thus spared “post-abortion trauma,” and that viability is 21 weeks. So there’s only a margin of one week to have an abortion pre-viability.

The tract stated that “25 - 31%” of all misarriages occur by 20 weeks. A little googling reviewed that 20% ocur by seven weeks. If I were pregnant, I would not wait the extra 14 weeks!