Harris and Walz are terrifying on abortion

If you listened to Democratic campaigners in the US Presidential elections, late-term abortions do not happen in America, or they happen so rarely that they are not worth mentioning, or they only happen in cases of life-limiting conditions and threats to the life of the mother.

Lyman Stone is a Lutheran demographer who works for the Institute of Family Studies, and he begs to differ.

He agrees that abortions after 32 weeks are a small share of total abortions, and suggests that they comprise perhaps 0.5 per cent. (He says he deliberately chose the lower end of possible figures.)

If we take away those abortions that were due to unsurvivable conditions, perhaps 0.25 % of these babies could have survived if born. Given that there are more or less I million abortions in the US, that’s 2,500 such abortions.

He compares this to the figures of US homicides, about  23,000 in 2023.

Those so-called rare late-term abortions are the equivalent of more than one in ten of the homicide figures.

He goes on: ‘In 2023, there were only 11,000 deaths of all external causes (accidents, homicides, etc) of people under age 18.’

‘Using the CDC’s multiple mortality data, these extremely rare late-term abortions are nonetheless the second biggest cause of death among people under 18 (after congenital immaturity).’ (Source: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1833942759067320336)

Lyman Stone’s point is that liberals worry about all causes of death in under 18s – all causes of death except late-term abortions.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s rhetoric about ‘executing babies’ if they are born alive after abortion, allows pro-choice supporters of late-term abortions to declare that infanticide is illegal in every US state, so therefore no child is being executed. It allows them to side-step the question of whether babies are being allowed to die.

While Trump’s bombastic rhetoric is unhelpful, the commitment to abortion of Kamala Harris and her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, is terrifying.

Tim Walz passed legislation in Minnesota that removed the legal obligation to ‘preserve the life and health’ of born-alive infants and replaced it with the word ‘care’, which the co-author  of the legislative change, Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, described as ‘comfort language.’

In other words, born-alive infants receive only comfort care, that is, no life-saving medical intervention. But is comfort care just avoiding futile interventions?

Outside of the context of abortions, in the case of disabilities like Trisomy 13, Dr Marty McCaffrey,  a US neonatologist, says that ‘many physicians know medical care is not futile but believe the lives that result are not meaningful. A survey of trisomy support group families found 93% were told their child was “lethal,” 61% felt pressure to abort and 94% were told their child would die before birth. The fact that many doctors still refer to these conditions as “lethal” speaks volumes. It exposes bias regarding the quality of life, not the ability to survive.’

Dr McCaffrey’s research shows that survival rates seem to depend on whether so-called ‘lethal’ conditions are diagnosed before birth. When discovered at birth, medical interventions such as oxygen are administered and the babies live longer. When known beforehand, rates of survival plummet, perhaps because of low expectations.

He states that the ‘literature for trisomy [13] babies that receive medical care report survival to 50% at one year for children alive at one month and 20% at 10 years.’

A society which deems life not worth living because of disability is already skidding down a slippery slope. The term used in Ireland is fatal foetal abnormality, yet children do stubbornly survive, albeit with profound disabilities. Their exhausted families have to fight for every support while a beloved child lives.

Children aborted for ableist reasons may have little chance of survival. However, it is not true that most US  late-term abortions take place due to life-limiting conditions. Last year, journalist Elaine Godfrey interviewed an 84 year old doctor, Warren Hern, who carries out legal late-term abortions in Colorado.

He has even carried out sex-selection abortions, once for a woman who did not want a girl and once for a woman who did not want a boy. He says half the babies he aborts are not for health reasons.

He answered a hypothetical question about a woman with no health issues presenting at 30 weeks, confirming that he would abort. He used to have nightmares about the babies he aborted but no longer suffers from them.

There is another kind of nightmare that Democratic candidates want to conceal. They are unwilling to condemn Dr Hern and his gruesome trade but they know that voters are repulsed by it so they pretend that it does not happen or only happens in extreme cases.

Tragically, neither of those defences is true. Instead, long after viability, children are being killed under the guise of medicine in US abortion facilities.