One of the abortion lobby's favorite things to claim is that late-term abortions are vanishingly rare or even nonexistent, and/or that the women who do undertake them do so only when their babies are suffering from unsurvivable ailments.
As Kamala Harris recently argued at this week's presidential debate:
[N]owhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That is not happening.
But actually, it is happening! It happens with some regularity. And in many cases late-term abortions happen not because a woman or her baby is in medical danger, but because the woman simply doesn't want to have the baby.
We covered two women who called abortion clinics this week to prove just how easy it is to abort a child in the final month or two of pregnancy.
The Atlantic also recently reported that potentially a majority of women seeking such abortions are not doing so because of a medical crisis:
If these abortions are in fact somewhat common, and many if not most of them are undertaken for non-life-threatening reasons, what do the numbers really look like?
Well, here's Institute for Family Studies researcher Lyman Stone with some thoughts:
Abortions after 32 weeks are a very small share of total abortions-- perhaps 0.5%. Let's say half of those are not due to unsurvivable conditions, so 0.25% of abortions are very late + could have survived if born.
Given ~1 million abortions, that's 2500 such abortions.
There were about 23,000 homicides in the US in 2023.
If that teeny tiny share of abortions covering very late abortions of totally viable kids without lethal health issues were counted, those extremely rare abortions would compose fully 1-in-10 homicides in the United States.
The numbers are starker when you control for other variables. As Stone notes: "In 2023, there were only 11,000 deaths of all external causes (accidents, homicides, etc) of people under age 18."
Abortions of health viable children [thus] make up 18% of all non-natural-causes deaths of children.
Late-term abortion deaths, in other words, make up a huge percentage of deaths for individuals under 18:
As stone notes, it is "true that these abortions are an EXTREMELY small share of overall abortions!" Yet ...
... the scale of abortions is so absolutely MASSIVE compared to child mortality that even a teeny tiny sliver of abortions would represent a huge share of child deaths.
Show these data to your pro-abortion friends and family next time they insist these numbers aren't real.
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