Legally End Late Term Abortion for the Baby, Mother, and Our sake
Guest Commentary by Dr. David Ramsey
Asheville Citizen-Times
Saturday, February 8, 2003
Legislation will be coming up, again, this year to end the procedure called partial birth abortion. As a physician I continue to be amazed that some people, even in the medical profession, still seem to not know what this procedure, or late term abortion for that matter, really is? The Supreme Court has essentially thrown out 31 state’s laws against partial birth abortion (Are states’ rights also dead?) and despite a bill passing both houses of congress twice, one man- President Clinton, vetoed and thus blocked, the will of the country to end this ghastly “surgery”.
Let’s define terms. Warning!, you may find the following disturbing; it is the graphic truth, the description, of the legal procedure called partial birth abortion that as fellow members of society we have all sanctioned: the baby (between ~20 weeks to term) is delivered feet first until only the head is in the womb. An instrument is jabbed in through the back of the baby’s skull and with the baby kicking and finally stiffening up its brains are sucked out and it is killed. Deliver the head another 3 inches, then perform the procedure and the doctor could be charged with murder. A legal 3 inches; can our ethics be measured in 3 inch increments? However, this is not the only late term abortion method. These babies are also killed by poisoning them with various drugs and burning them with salt solutions. Man is ingenious enough to come up with many methods. China, who forcefully aborts women against their will, and the USA are the only two countries in the world that have the distinction of allowing abortions up until birth. Aren’t we civilized?
Ron Fitzsimmons, former executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, has stated that “women had these abortions only in the most extreme circumstances of life endangerment or fetal anomaly”, and that the procedure was “rarely used.” He later admitted that they were not done in response to extreme medical conditions but on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses, they were done 3-5000 times a year, and that he lied “through my teeth”…”because the truth might have hurt the cause of abortion rights”. A series of 2000 partial-birth abortions of Dr. James McMahon showed only 9 % performed for maternal health indications, the most common reason was depression. But, pro-abortion (pro-choice) folks have made a terrible mistake to cross the viable baby; line in the sand. The line needs redrawn at this ghastly, murderous procedure, unless the mother’s life is truly threatened, and even then it is often safer to deliver her than abort her.
The Physicians’ Ad hoc Coalition for Truth-PHACT (made up of 600 physician specialists in OB and perinatology) have stated that, “Never is the partial-birth procedure medically indicated.” At the authors’ hospitals in the JAMA article “Late-term Abortion”, if babies are delivered instead of aborted, 83 % survive at 24 weeks- and 89 % survive at 25 weeks. C. Evertt Koop says of partial-birth abortion, “It is as close to infanticide as anything I have come upon”. It has been propagandized by the pro-abortion and obviously medically illiterate editorialist Ellen Goodman that these babies don’t feel pain in these procedures. Dr. Robert J. White, director of neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve U., disagrees noting, “The fetus in a late-term partial-abortion is at an age of gestation where pain can be perceived”…”the details are so gross and ghastly that”….” it is “impossible to believe that medical colleagues…would carry it out.” In the JAMA article the authors say, “It is beyond ironic that the pain management practiced for an intact D and X (partial birth abortion) on a human fetus would not meet federal standards for the humane care of animals used in medical research.”
Killing a potentially survivable baby is infanticide. There is absolutely no reason to kill these post viable babies; we can deliver them. At 21 weeks the risk of maternal death from induced abortion is 1 in 6000, twice the risk of death from childbirth, which is 1 in 13,000. The AMA has said, “except in extraordinary circumstances, maternal health factors that demand termination of the pregnancy can be accommodated without sacrifice of the fetus.” It is an ethical truth that the autonomy of the fetus takes equal precedence or greater over the autonomy of the woman when the fetus evolves into an individual capable of survival independent of its mother.
An August 2002 article in the Southern Medical Journal, in total agreement with a large Finnish study, shows that for a decade post abortion; women are twice as likely to die than women who had delivered their babies! The Planned Parenthood response to this article, “Women often feel relief after an abortion.” The pro-abortion front claims to look after women, but seem to abandon them and the truth when harmful affects of abortion surface. Rather than a studied and worried response for women, they just ignore the facts.
The public, 31 state governments, and the AMA are opposed to the procedure. We can not settle for just a partial birth abortion ban. We have to have a total viable fetus (late term), abortion ban. Life of the mother (not the open-ended term ‘health’ of the mother) can be the only exception. Doctors should be prosecuted for murder if the facts show the mother was not in eminent danger. In our profession, these doctors are still generally considered sleazy and outcasts. Any wonder that there are decreasing numbers of abortionists?
David M. Ramsey, III MD