Since then, abortion has been politically debated, and one way politics has entered abortion policy is within its terminology. You've likely seen some abortions referred to as 'late-term abortion'. However, 'late-term abortion' is not a recognized medical term. According to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology , "the term 'late-term abortion' has no medical definition and is not used in a clinical setting or to describe the delivery of abortion care later in pregnancy.
Adds Gillian Dean, M. To be clear: There is no such thing as an abortion up until birth, and 'late-term abortion' is not a term used by reputable health care providers. Still, we often hear these terms in the news—and you may have even mistakenly used them yourself.
We chatted with experts to clear up the confusion. Keeping abortion terminology by gestation period is the proper way to define it. Since , when abortion was legalized nationally, around 11 percent of abortions have occurred at or after 13 weeks gestation. According to the Guttmacher Institute, here is when women have abortions percentage-wise:. While most abortions occur before 8 weeks, second or third trimester abortions are also options women may have.
These are the most common reasons an abortion may occur during the second or third trimester:. These include: anencephaly, the absence of the brain and cranium above the base of the skull, or limb-body wall complex, when the organs develop outside of the body cavity, according to the ACOG. Other medical complications include: premature rupture of membranes and infection, placental abruption, and placenta accreta, which may risk extensive blood loss, stroke, and septic shock that could lead to maternal death, according to the ACOG.
Second and third trimester abortions may also be more common in places with more strict abortion laws. Adds Souder, "These restrictions have forced many clinics to close, in turn creating waiting lists, sometimes two to three weeks out.
Even though the baby in her womb would not be able to live outside of it, she would have to go elsewhere to have an abortion. The R. Christensen and her medical team made arrangements for her to travel to Colorado, where abortion is essentially regulated like any other medical procedure. With help from her mother, she scrounged up more than ten thousand dollars to pay for the procedure and the trip. She flew back to New York and had a physically excruciating stillbirth at a hospital.
A week and a half later, she e-mailed me. I was working at the Web site Jezebel, which often publishes stories about abortion law. Christensen wanted to describe what had happened to her.
When we spoke on the phone, her milk was still coming in. Her baseline experience of pregnancy had been punishing to begin with, and New York law had made it much worse. When New York first legalized abortion, in , it was one of only four states where the practice was legal. Between July of and January of , roughly three hundred and fifty thousand out-of-state abortion patients came to New York; in the first two years after the state law passed, sixty per cent of women who had abortions in New York came from out of state.
Watson is a professor and bioethicist at Northwestern, a former lawyer for the A. The vast majority of abortions take place in the first trimester. Fewer than ten per cent of abortions occur at fourteen weeks or later, and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, only slightly more than one per cent of abortions are performed at twenty-one weeks or later.
Given how rare late-term abortion is, few elected officials are willing to risk the political costs of making it a cause. Late-term abortion makes many people deeply uncomfortable: at that point in a pregnancy, we are no longer talking about a lime-size fetus that hardly resembles a person. Doctors who perform late-term abortions have wrestled with the profound difficulties of fetal personhood; they have arguably done so to a greater extent than anyone else.
Several years ago, I interviewed Dr. George Tiller, who previously had been part of that group, was murdered by an anti-abortion activist, in Robinson told me that, in her practice, she used whatever terms her patients used. She would cry with them and pray with them. She spent every day with an ethical question that many people abhor. The calculus was hard, she said. Sometimes the compelling factor was that the patient was eleven years old.
But what if the patient were fifteen, or sixteen? New York has repeatedly rejected attempts to ban abortion procedures. Importantly, the U. Supreme Court has already concluded that any ban on abortion procedures must include a health exception. Congress attempted to get around this ruling, when passing the Federal Abortion Ban, by stating that the procedures prohibited by the Ban are never medically necessary — ignoring significant medical opinion to the contrary.
Accordingly, on Aug. Citing the requirements established by the Stenberg ruling, Judge Casey found the Federal Abortion Ban unconstitutional. His ruling joined decisions by federal district judges in the Ninth Circuit California and Eighth Circuit Nebraska , which struck down the Ban in parallel cases brought by Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Center for Reproductive Rights, respectively. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which heard the case on Oct.
On Jan. Two of the three judges on the panel Judges Newman and Walker ruled that the Federal Abortion Ban is unconstitutional. However, Judge Walker wrote a separate concurring opinion explaining that he felt bound by the Supreme Court's decision in Stenberg v. Carhart which struck down a Nebraska statute similar to the Federal Ban.
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