In the News - On Abortion

When you think of the word "Abortion", what comes to mind? According to WebMD, the definition for Abortion is: "the early ending of a pregnancy."

Let me preface. It took me a year to get pregnant. I had to take fertility drugs, but I did not need in vitro fertilization or anything. When I found out I was pregnant, it was one of the happiest days of my life and I was looking forward to seeing my baby grow and nurturing him or her as best as I could. Some women go through excruciating pain and many procedures in order to be able to fulfill their lifelong dream of conceiving a child. And sometimes, even after all that pain and suffering, they have finally become pregnant with a child only to find out that their precious miracle will never see the light of day because something is wrong...terribly wrong.

Such was the case for the woman in the article: When there is no good choice. The article has her heartbreaking story and also discusses something that has been in the news on and off, Abortion.

IN MY OPINION it is easy for someone who has never had a baby or been pregnant to get an abortion. Heck, I was one of those people that always thought it was something I would do if I wasn't ready for a baby (before I got married). It is especially easy for men to say "why don't you get an abortion?" when they don't want a baby, especially seeing how many "men" out there can't even take care of the life they helped bring into this world, but that's another post altogether.

The topic that this article covers is actually "late term Abortion". According to Wikipedia, A late-term abortion often refers to an induced abortion procedure that occurs after the 20th week of gestation. However, the exact point when a pregnancy becomes late-term is not clearly defined. Some sources define an abortion after 12 completed weeks' gestation as "late". Some sources define an abortion after 16 weeks as "late". Three articles published in 1998 in the same issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association could not agree on the definition. Two of the JAMA articles chose the 20th week of gestation to be the point where an abortion procedure would be considered late-term. The third JAMA article chose the third trimester, or 27th week of gestation.

The point at which an abortion becomes late-term is often related to the "viability" (ability to survive outside the uterus) of the fetus. Sometimes late-term abortions are referred to as post-viability abortions. However, viability varies greatly between pregnancies. Nearly all pregnancies are viable after the 27th week, and almost no pregnancies are viable before the 20th week. Everything in between is a "grey area".

According to the article, "No woman wants to imagine ending an advanced pregnancy after her belly has begun to swell and she has felt her baby kicking with life. Thankfully, few women have to take this step.

"Later-term abortions — those performed at 16 weeks and beyond — account for only 4.3 percent of the 1.21 million pregnancies ended in the United States each year, according to the Guttmacher Institute in New York City. These cases are often misunderstood, says Michael F. Greene, M.D., director of obstetrics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "Part of the strategy of [anti-abortion activists] is to demonize these women and make them into unsympathetic characters who view second-trimester abortion as a trivial decision," Dr. Greene says. "I have never met a woman who didn't agonize over this decision.""

So, what does the law say about abortion?

In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. In doing so, it banned for the first time certain methods of abortion, including intact dilation and extraction, a later-term procedure also known as D&X or intact D&E. Now, unless a physician can offer unequivocal proof that a patient would die without a D&X, the doctor risks being fined $250,000 and sent to prison for up to two years.

Since the Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana and Utah have implemented bans on D&X procedures, allowing those states to impose their own penalties. (Louisiana allows doctors to be fined up to $100,000 and given “hard labor” jail terms of up to 10 years.) Eleven more states have introduced similar bills this year.

Thirty-six states prohibit almost all abortions after a baby is viable, but most don’t define when that is. Meanwhile, the new federal abortion ban and its state doppelgängers are written so broadly that doctors worry the penalties could apply to other procedures besides D&X, some performed as early as 13 weeks of pregnancy. The result is that patients and doctors can’t always be sure when it is legal to perform an abortion or what methods are allowed.

The D&X technique is so uncommon that many doctors who perform second-trimester abortions, including Dr. Nichols and Dr. Greene, have never used it. Nevertheless, they worry that in an emergency, it would no longer be available to them. "The law makes no exception for a woman’s health, only if her life is at risk," says Dr. Nichols, also the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Columbia/Willamette in Oregon. "If during a standard D&E a woman has lost a quart of blood and I consider her to be dying, and I perform a ‘partial-birth abortion’ to save her, I fear there will be an expert witness to testify that I intervened too soon."

So, are there any alternatives?

Yes, Perinatal Hospice. Choices Medical Clinic, a privately funded nonprofit, opened in 1999 and is one of as many as 2,500 "crisis pregnancy centers" nationwide that exist to persuade pregnant women to avoid abortion. Choices was one of the first centers to offer perinatal hospice: end-of-life services for fetuses akin to the standard hospice care available to the sick and the elderly.

The facility doesn’t provide primary medical care; deliveries or inductions are done at local hospitals. But women who enlist its hospice services are invited to have free sonograms every day of their doomed pregnancy and, if they find it a comfort, can have free professional pictures taken of them and their dead or dying children after they are born. "Our job is to start from the womb to the tomb," says Scott Stringfield, M.D., a family physician in Wichita and medical director of Choices. "We try to comfort women and facilitate greater closeness to their child."

Hopefully this post has helped you to learn a little more about abortion and the agonizing choice it is for millions of mothers.