Most women who get later-term abortions don’t do it for health reasons, contrary to what Hillary Clinton suggested in the last presidential debate.
The Democratic presidential nominee and her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, spent an unusual amount of time in their Oct. 19 faceoff discussing a decision made by roughly 9,000 U.S. women every year — to terminate more than halfway through a pregnancy.
Asked by debate moderator Chris Wallace to explain why she doesn’t support any limits on late-term abortions, Clinton pointed to women who learn later in pregnancy that their lives are jeopardized or the fetus has a major developmental problem.
“The kinds of cases that fall at the end of pregnancy are often the most heartbreaking, painful decisions for families to make,” Clinton said. “I have met with women who have, toward the end of their pregnancy, get the worst news one could get.”
There’s little to no data on exactly why women get later-term abortions, but researchers have said only a small minority stem from medical reasons. And in a rare, 2013 study on late-term abortions, two University of California researchers didn’t even include medical problems among reasons why women might seek abortions more than halfway through pregnancy.
Instead, the researchers concluded that aside from tending to be younger and employed less, women who seek late-term abortions don’t differ much from women who get first-trimester abortions.
“Data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment,” wrote Diana Greene and Katrina Kimport, professors at the University of California, San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health.
“Indeed, we know very little about women who seek later abortions,” they wrote.
Greene and Kimport, whose study was published in the Guttmacher Institute’s journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, asked 272 women to explain why they got a late-term abortion based on eight reasons, including financial difficulties, lack of knowledge of where to get the procedure and disagreements with a partner.
When they compared the answers to a group of women who got abortions in the first trimester, they found few differences.
“In contemporary discussions of later abortion, few empirical data exist about the women who seek these procedures, but speculation abounds, including the presumption that these women are intrinsically different from those seeking early abortions,” the authors wrote.
“Despite this common narrative, women in our study who obtained first-trimester abortions and women who obtained abortions at or after 20 weeks’ gestation were remarkably similar.”
According to the study, women seeking later abortions were raising children alone, were depressed or using banned substances, were experiencing domestic violence or other conflict, were young, or had trouble deciding what to do.
Only seven states allow abortions to be performed in the final trimester up until birth, according to Guttmacher. Late-term abortions compromise a tiny sliver of the total number of abortions performed in the country, just 1.3 percent in 2012.
Yet abortions later in pregnancy are more controversial, prompting questions of whether it’s ethically OK to terminate a fetus when it would be able, or almost able, to survive if born.
Trump, who formerly supported abortion rights but now says he doesn’t, called late-term abortion “terrible” during the debate.
“If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month you can take baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” Trump said. “Now, you can say that that is OK, and Hillary can say that that is OK, but it’s not OK with me.”
“Well, that is not what happens in these cases,” Clinton responded. “And using that kind of scare rhetoric is just terribly unfortunate.”
