About a month ago, Conservatives were up in arms with Virginia introducing the Repeal Act in their House of Representatives. While the bill will improve access to abortions for pregnant women, it doesn’t change when women can access an abortion. Conservatives were claiming that the changes would allow so-called “late-term abortions”, but third-trimester abortions are already legal in Virginia.
Some of the changes in the Repeal Act include the following:
- No longer requiring abortion patients to get an ultrasound
- Allowing abortions during the second trimester to occur outside of state-licensed hospitals
- Lowering the number of doctors from 3 to 1 needed to agree that a third trimester abortion is necessary for the health of the mother.
A conservative friend of mine recently shared an article from a conservative news website, and they raised the following points when doing so:
- Opposition to “late-term” abortions
- There are lots of people who would love to adopt
I left a comment on their post, addressing those two points, and I thought I’d share it here, too.
First, the term “late term abortions” is an incorrect term, given that late-term pregnancies are ones beyond 40 weeks. Even so, more than 99% of abortions occur before 24 weeks gestation, and 98.6% occur before 21 weeks. When they actually do occur, third-term abortions occur almost exclusively because of health issues; although there are some cases where they happen because a woman did not have access to an abortion earlier on in the pregnancy.
Second, it’s true that there are people who want to adopt, but they won’t adopt babies who are stillborn or have anencephaly or limb-body wall complex. Also, there are over 400,000 children currently in the foster care system in the United States. There’s no shortage of children for adoptive parents to adopt.
It’s ridiculous to make abortions illegal for later in the pregnancy. It makes no sense to risk a woman’s physical health or force her to go through the trauma of birthing a baby who is born dead or dies within hours of birth. Nor does it make sense to force a woman to carry even an entirely healthy baby to term if she doesn’t want to when the foster care system is already overburdened. Forcing a woman to remain pregnant even if she doesn’t want to is treating her like a baby farm, like livestock. It’s dehumanizing.
Improving abortion access actually reduces the abortion rate. So does comprehensive sex education and free, accessible birth control. Advocating for those 3 things will do more to reduce abortions than opposing abortions will.
Resources
- Repeal Act
- What’s Going On With The Virginia Abortion Bill That Has Conservatives Up In Arms?
- Before judging ‘late-term abortion,’ understand what it means, doctors say
- Abortion rates go down when countries make it legal: report
