Posts tagged: late term abortion
(trigger warning for abortion, birth, pregnancy, miscarriage and forced birth)
This is just unbelievably sad. Arizona has now banned abortions after 20 weeks since the pregnant person’s last period. And as usual, the main people who get late-term abortions — people who will not have a healthy baby and mom when it’s all over — are the victims.
Via thinkprogress:
MISS Foundation and Embrace are non-profits specifically working to develop birth plans for such families, provide counseling, and prepare funeral services. The Legislature has allocated no funding for these services, which are expected to kick into high demand once the abortion ban goes into effect.
About 100 pregnancies are terminated after 20 weeks in Arizona each year. According to Joanne Cacciatore, the CEO of MISS Foundation, one or two families a month currently seek their help preparing for a fatal birth. But they expect their resources to be stretched past maximum capacity soon. Cacciatore said:
This law may have intended to do good, but it can really adversely affect non-profit organizations that desperately want to help people but maybe can’t help the number of people who now come to us. We are already stretched very, very thin. I don’t know where this money would come from. […] They’re finding us on their own. I don’t know what will happen when the Legislature opens this up.
So: no babies are saved, the mothers’ lives are put at risk, and their insurance carriers have to bear the cost of a dangerous labor and delivery (not to mention ongoing prenatal care). Tell me again who this benefits? Oh, right, self-righteous pro-lifers who can pat themselves on the back for saving the precious babies from their grieving mothers.
This is especially sick, given the vast number of severe fetal abnormalities that are only first discovered at the ~20 week ultrasound. I’m not sure the anti-choicers behind this legislation realize just how cruelly effective they have been, given their general lack of knowledge of obstetrics and gynecology, but they’ve done it.
Reblogging for the daytime crowd and for this ^^ commentary. Most doctors do the test that diagnoses fatal illnesses in the fetus do it at 20 weeks, because before then, the fetus is so small that you can’t really detect problems like that. So the main people who will be affected by this are pregnant people with a WANTED pregnancy who find out their baby won’t survive the birth. It’s known as a “fatal birth.” The state of Arizona is forcing mothers to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term and give birth to a dead or dying child. This happened in Brazil: because of their strict abortion laws, a woman was forced to carry a fetus that developed without a brain.
Late-term abortion is just… pregnant people don’t get abortions at that point unless something is really, really wrong. It’s heartbreaking for the parents who go through it (those are both links to personal accounts of women’s late-term abortions of wanted pregnancies). It’s incredibly sad and difficult on its own. These parents don’t need legislators cruelly enforcing a naive pro-life agenda on top of it.
Again for the commentary.
