Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe made a campaign stop at an abortion clinic in Charlottesville on Thursday:
Terry McAuliffe campaigning this afternoon at an abortion facility that advertises abortion on demand up to 16 weeks of pregnancy.
Here’s a description of a baby at 15 weeks of pregnancy (from the first Google result I hit): https://t.co/vIAEzWfOJQ pic.twitter.com/vmxx2TLmVy
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) September 9, 2021
The abortion facility, Whole Women’s Health, advertises that it performs abortions up to 16 weeks of pregnancy. Here’s how one maternity website describes the development of a baby at 15 weeks of pregnancy: “Your baby is looking more like a little person, with eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, hair, and well-defined fingers and toes. If you could see inside your womb, you’d catch your baby sucking a thumb, yawning, stretching and making faces!”
Virginia has a very permissive statute that allows abortion for any reason up to 28 weeks of pregnancy. Premature infants born as early as 21 weeks have survived their stays in the neo-natal intensive care unit.
The Whole Woman’s Health facility in Maryland performs abortions up to 22 weeks, so why does Whole Woman’s Health stop performing abortions at 16 weeks in Virginia? “A big part of our holdback for our Virginia clinics is that our doctors who we work for don’t want to go past 16 weeks,” a spokesperson for Whole Woman’s Health spokesperson tells National Review in a phone interview. “So obviously they’re our providers, and they kind of dictate it because there aren’t very many abortion providers in the world.”
In Terry McAuliffe’s view, the law should go much farther than what abortion doctors at the Virginia clinic he visited are willing to do.
In 2019, McAuliffe called a radical abortion bill sponsored by Delegate Kathy Tran a “common sense bill.” Tran’s bill would allow a single doctor to abort a baby in the ninth month of pregnancy if the doctor said it was for mental-health reasons. McAuliffe is now portraying himself as a supporter of the status quo on abortion laws in Virginia, but he would not say on Tuesday if he’d block Tran’s bill if it landed on his desk, and he’s pushing for an amendment adding a right to abortion in the state constitution that would accomplish what Tran’s bill sought to accomplish and much more.