Their claims at a Senate hearing rely on evidence that ranges from dubious to nonexistent.
Their claims at a Senate hearing rely on evidence that ranges from dubious to nonexistent.
A t the very tail end of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, two Democratic senators defended their support for legal abortion throughout pregnancy. They were responding to Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who had noted that support. The senators drew on standard Democratic talking points on this issue. The available evidence runs counter to what they said, and the evidence they cited ranged from dubious to nonexistent.
First up was Peter Welch (D., Vt.), who said, “My understanding is that late-term abortions are very rare, and it’s almost always — really probably always — where there’s a medical emergency and the life of the woman is imperiled.”
Next came Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), the chairman of the committee, who said:
I listened to [Cruz] and then I read some information given to me by my staff. What are the reasons for really late-term abortions? Well, there are three. And the information I’m reading from comes from the Center for Disease Control. Why women need access to abortion late in pregnancy: maternal health endangerment; diagnosis of severe fetal abnormality which didn’t show up or develop until late in the pregnancy; restrictive state laws that made it difficult for a woman to get an abortion earlier in pregnancy. And we’re talking about 1 percent of all abortions.
Senator Durbin’s office has so far declined to share with me any CDC document that makes these claims either verbatim or in paraphrase; the CDC’s regular abortion-surveillance report does not include data on the reasons for abortions late in pregnancy. (Update: A CDC spokesman confirms to me that the organization does not collect this information.) Google does turn up one document that includes some similar verbiage: a CNN.com interview with two doctor-activists who advocate unrestricted abortion. (“Before judging ‘late-term abortion,’ understand what it means, doctors say” is the headline, which is amazing even for CNN.)
One of those activists cites the CDC on the prevalence of late-term abortion. She then makes more defensible claims than Durbin or Welch did: “There are many reasons why women may need to access abortion later in pregnancy, including” the three Durbin listed. She does not say the CDC is the source for this claim; she cites no source. “CNN’s interview of a pro-abortion activist” does not sound quite as authoritative as the CDC, does it?
The press routinely makes or quotes evidence-free claims about the reasons for abortions late in pregnancy. A 2013 review found, however, that most abortions done between weeks 20 and 28 are not “for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” For example: Forty percent of respondents mentioned “trouble deciding about the abortion” as a reason for getting one later in pregnancy; 65 percent cited difficulty raising the money for the abortion. Abortions done between weeks 20 and 28 are, as one might expect, a large majority of all abortions done after week 20.
The Atlantic profiled Warren Hern, a doctor who specializes in abortions late in pregnancy, last year. He said (in the magazine’s paraphrase) that “at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses” — that is, of severe fetal abnormality or life endangerment.
Whether Durbin’s third category of abortions late in pregnancy — those done because of restrictions that prevented earlier abortions — offer a sufficient reason to allow such abortions is of course a matter of opinion. We do not have good numbers on the prevalence of this reason for getting a late abortion. We have no reason at all for thinking that his list of three reasons is, as he presented it, exhaustive.
Durbin is correct that abortions after 21 weeks of gestation account for about 1 percent of all abortions. That works out, given estimates of the total number of abortions, to more than 10,200 such abortions annually. For comparison, gun homicides claimed the lives of 1,600 American children and teenagers last year.
Welch is, meanwhile, totally wrong. Nobody who has spent five minutes looking into this issue would believe what he said.