The pro-life people were on campus today, and got into an argument with some pro-choicers about late term abortions. And it got me to wondering: why do women get late term abortions? It seems to me that a woman who is inclined to get an abortion would want to get it earlier when it’s less risky and she shows less signs of pregnancy (to avoid any social stigma). I know that there’s no one answer, but I wonder what some of the answers are.
Because they have to wait until they’re 18 in order to avoid the parental notification laws.
Not every fetus survives to full term, and carrying a dead fetus poses serious health risks to the mother. That’s one reason. There are others, many medical in nature.
See here for a discussion of some of them, or google “dilation extraction” for lots of information.
My daughter was born last summer. At 6 days old, she went into seizures, and suffered massive brain damage in just a few hours. She was taken by ambulance to Children’s Hospital Boston where she stayed for the next 6 weeks with one of us with her 24/7 until she died. After ruling out most things, doctors found out about one of the rarest genetic diseases in the world (Sulfite Oxidase deficiency; 50 known cases world-wide). They saw that it fit the clinical profile but they had no proof. We racked up over $200,000 in medical bills in those 6 weeks.
If doctors and geneticists hunches were correct, any future child would have a 1 in 4 chance of getting the disease, be born healthy, and go into devastating seizures when it was only days old, and have a 100% chance of death within weeks or months and never come out of a coma after the seizures.
We have one healthy daughter already and we want one more child so we decided to leap in and try for another. My wife got pregnant right away. The problem was that no tests existed to test for the condition in utero. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and some labs in Europe would have to invent one and and test the baby before we could even acknowledge that we had a viable child.
They rushed to invent a test and got it done. By then, we were close to the 4 month mark. The test could take 2 - 6 weeks to grow cell lines and test DNA. We got the results back a few weeks ago and it is healthy.
If it wasn’t healthy, we would have had to abort. There is no way we were going through that again and putting some of the best medical teams in the world and ourselves in a hopeless situation.
The tests could have easily gone on longer through no fault of anyone’s own and that could have resulted in an even longer pregnancy before abortion. Because of the incurable and untreatable nature of the disease, it would be necessary to abort it at any stage before birth.
An untreatable disease with a 100% mortality rate shortly after birth seems like a good reason to have an abortion at any time to me.
Wow…just, wow.
(And: congratulations.)
I’m glad.
And thanks for telling your story. I think it can be easy not to put real people in real situations behind the stories when we’re all bickering about something that’s been tainted by politics.
a) Because they want one. Shagnasty’s story is one. At perhaps a nearly-opposite pole in some ways are people who are very much akin to the infanticide cases you read about in the newspapers: i.e., instead of waiting until the baby is born and then snuffing it in the bathroom and hoping no one will find out, they finally opt for an abortion very very late in the process. People have their reasons. If they didn’t have their reasons there would be no late-term abortions, would there? Because they want one. That is sufficient in my book. She, the pregnant person, is the one to call the shots here. We’d be outraged on her behalf if someone did something to kill a pregnant person’s wanted fetus. We mourn for pregnant women whose desired child is stillborn in a spontaneous abortion. If she says the baby oughtn’t be born, well, she’s the one who’s there on the scene, as it were. No one else is closer. Her authority.
b) There is no b
c) There is no c
Some women have very long menstrual cycles. The longest I’ve personally known is once every six months (this was her natural cycle, she was not on any sort of hormones). Since missing a period is often the first sign of pregnancy, a woman with long cycles could easily fail to notice that she’s pregnant. Some women have very irregular periods, and are inclined to skip a month or two in the normal course of events. Some women (and especially girls) simply don’t want to deal with the fact that they are pregnant, and don’t do anything about the pregnancy until it’s fairly well advanced. The girls usually don’t want to tell their parents. Some women think that their lives are going very well indeed, until they find out that their man is seeing someone else, or he gets thrown in jail, or he takes off when he finds out she’s pregnant. Some women think that they’d like to have a child, but realize that they really do not want one. Some women (and again, especially girls) think that getting pregnant is a surefire way to win a man’s affections.
I don’t think that any woman or girl wants to deliberately have a later term abortion.
(Shagnasy- thanks for sharing your story. I’m sorry to hear of the loss of your precious daughter. Do you have another child on the way now? I wasn’t sure from your post.)
Shagnasty’s story is pretty typical of families who get into the late second or even third trimester before deciding to terminate.
Most folks see the Doc for the first visit around 8-10 weeks. Some testing is done at this early gestation. The woman will usually continue to see the doc about once a month, and then she will typically get a routine ultrasound around 24 to 28 weeks. Sometimes, this is the first indication that something is wrong. If that US shows problems that were not seen earlier, the woman will then go for further testing and wait some length of time for the results. By now, the pregnancy has progressed quite a bit.
This is the kind of thing that I hate about the abortion “debate.” Someone, in this case me, asks a question looking for information, and somebody says something like this. I’m not singling out the pro-lifers here; it could just as easily have been someone yelling about women dying by the thousands in back alleys. At some point, there will be legitimate debate among reasonable, informed people. This obviously won’t be the place.
Thank you for sharing this.
A) I don’t think that AHunter is a pro-lifer, as you seem to think
B) It was a perfectly valid answer to your question
Another similar answer - sometimes people change their minds. Or their circumstances change - I have a friend who had a fairly early-term abortion because her husband died in an accident, and she didn’t want to raise the kid alone. I can see similar reasoning working later in a pregnancy.
I’m sixty-two. I’ve never known anyone to get a late term abortion. I don’t think that it happens very often.
What on earth provoked this? I had to re-read AHunter3’s post, and I don’t think you read the same thing I did.
Here are some statistics on late abortions from Norway. The English there is a bit awkward, but hopefully understandable. So, of 530 late abortions (later than 12th week) in 2004, 36 were because of the health of the pregnant woman, 238 because of social reasons, 202 due to serious damage to the fetus, and the rest are combinations of the other reasons and a few unknown. All in all, there were 14071 abortions in Norway in 2004.
According to this article (in Norwegian) about research on late abortions, most women who chose abortion because of serious damage to the fetus did consider to carry their child to term, but decided against it mainly because they didn’t trust that they and the child would get the support needed for the child to have a good life, especially after the parents died.
This article (also in Norwegian) tells that Norwegian women are less likely to abort fetuses with serious damage now than earlier. (The research covers the last 15 years.)
I’ve no idea how applicable these numbers are to other parts of the world. I know of some differences in abortion and pregancy trends, for instance Norway has relatively few teen pregnancies and teen abortions compared to other countries I’ve looked at.
CDC data shows only a small fraction (about 1%) of abortions in the US are after 21 weeks. It must be a painful decision for anyone to abort at that point. Anyone focusing on this in the abortion debate is bringing up a red herring.
But the red herring has A SOUL!
Yes, I have another daughter on the way and she will be born in late July. She has already been screened for every common genetic disease and some uncommon ones. She has checked out just fine on just about everything and does not have Sulfite Oxidase deficiency.
That will be the end of childbearing for us because it is too risky. Two healthy daughters is fine by me. Any more children would have to go through the same testing and that can’t happen until months into the pregancy.
If the baby is already dead, that wouldn’t be an abortion, would it?
No it isn’t, it is an extraction (DNC verses DNX normally); though the same procedure is more or less used.
Here is what I have never understood (perhaps someone could give me insight).
I understand the arguements for a) health of the mother (though I’m still unaware of any health problems that can be cured by abortion this late in the cycle) and b) health of the child (such as the story we have read; thank you for sharing).
I have never understood the socail aspect of it, the ‘i don’t want it’ aspect.
By the 3rd trimester you more or less have to ‘give birth’ to the fetus (or baby) dead or alive (though there are some methods that make it a bit easier); and you are normally ‘showing’ at that point; why not just give it up for adoption at birth?
I’m not sure what you mean.
Do you mean abortions very late in the second trimester, or abortions in the third trimester, or the even rarer partial-birth abortion?
Once you get past the second trimester the decision will almost always be a medical one as the vast majority of states regulate abortions post-viability.