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.