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Video: Hillary Clinton Opposes Any Legal Limits on Abortion, Even in the Ninth Month of Pregnancy. Will the media fact-check her bogus defense of late-term abortion? 1:46 PM, Sep 21, 2015 • By JOHN MCCORMACK
As the Senate prepares to vote tomorrow on a bill banning abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy, the point at which human infants can feel pain and survive if born prematurely, Hillary Clinton has expressed opposition to legal limits on abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
John Dickerson, CBS's host of Face the Nation, asked Clinton during an interview on Sunday: "The Senate's going to vote to impose a ban on late-term abortions. Do you support a federal limit on abortion at any stage of pregnancy?"
"I think that the kind of late-term abortions that take place are because of medical necessity, and therefore I would hate to see the government interfering with that decision," Clinton replied. "This gets back to whether you respect a woman's right to choose or not, and I think that's what this whole argument is about."
Clinton's claim that all late-term abortions are performed because of "medical necessity" is simply false:
According to Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL, elective late-term abortions never occur. "No woman carries their child to six, seven, eight months and then one day decides they don’t want to become a parent,” Hogue told the New York Times. That sounds plausible. Who would do such a thing? But a recent study contradicts Hogue's claim. "Diana Greene Foster, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and the University of California, San Francisco, co-authored a forthcoming paper looking at more than 200 women who had abortions after 20 weeks for nonmedical reasons," wrote Michelle Goldberg in the Daily Beast. "According to Foster, two thirds of them were delayed while they tried to raise money to pay for a termination. Twelve percent were teenagers, some of whom went months without realizing they were pregnant." The fact that one professor could find a sample of 200 women who had late-term abortions for "nonmedical reasons" indicates that the total number of elective late-term abortions is quite large.
Foster looked at what happened to women who had wanted a late-term abortion but missed their clinic's self-imposed or state-imposed deadlines. "About 5 percent of the women, after they have had the baby, still wish they hadn’t. And the rest of them adjust," she told the New York Times.
So late-term abortions do occur in the United States for no medical reason at all. One prominent late-term abortionist in Maryland admitted on camera that he will perform "purely elective" abortions through 28 weeks of pregnancy. Several states and the District of Columbia have no laws prohibiting abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy. And the late-term abortion ban in Congress explicitly includes an exception for when a physical health issue--"excluding psychological or emotional conditions"--endangers the life of the mother.
Gallup polls have found that 80 percent of Americans think abortion should be illegal during the last three months of pregnancy, while only 14 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal during the last three months of pregnancy:
Last week, the media claimed that Carly Fiorina had lied about what the Planned Parenthood videos revealed (in reality, it was a whole lot of quibbling.) Will the media scrutinize Hillary Clinton's blatantly false statement on abortion the same way it scrutinized Carly Fiorina's statement about the Planned Parenthood videos?
