The Sun mischaracterizes late-term abortions
So, our friends on the editorial board of The Baltimore Sun have offered their opinion on President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, and to no one’s surprise, it was negative. Even worse, they decided to focus on the one area any right thinking human should agree on: Late-term abortions (“Trump goes full demagogue on abortion,” Feb. 6).
Gone are the days of President Bill Clinton’s mantra of “safe, legal and rare.” Now, it’s abortions on demand and if you dare say anything about it, you are accused of trying to control women’s bodies.
There isn’t a lot of research on late-term abortion, but the best information we have comes from a study from Dr. Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. It found womenwhogot later abortions were mostly unmarried and many were already mothers. A Congressional Research Service report published in April 2018 quoted Dr. Foster, “[t]here aren’t good data on how often later abortions are for medical reasons.”
The report goes on to state “Based on limited research and discussions with researchers in the field, Dr. Foster believes that abortions for fetal anomaly make up a small minority of later abortion and that those for life endangerment are even harder to characterize.”
The authors also have an issue with the president’s description of the procedure (using despicable language like “ripped from the mother’s womb”). I ask, would they be all right with a medically detailed and accurate description of the procedure? Since at that point of gestation the baby is too large for it to be passed naturally, it needs to be made, well … smaller, and that’s as far as I will go with that. The procedure is horrific.
I will end with this question to the editorial board: If we all agree to allow abortions in the case of rape or incest and the health or life of the mother, would you then agree that the remaining incidents should be stopped? Of course you will not agree, so stop trying to use the 2-3 percent of abortions for those reasons as justification for the remaining 97-plus percent.
Rex Fisher, Pasadena