Late-term abortions are not being done to protect women’s health, former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino said this week.
An OB-GYN who gave up aborting unborn babies and became pro-life, Levatino wrote a column for World Net Daily debunking the common claim. He said “health exceptions” for third-trimester abortions are nothing but a sham.
“As a former abortionist, I vividly remember a 17-year-old patient who presented requesting her fifth abortion,” he wrote. “She unequivocally stated that she wanted the abortion so she would not be pregnant for her senior prom. … I could have justified that abortion to promote her social health.”
Today, doctors and non-doctors could use similar reasoning to abort a viable unborn baby in New York state under its new law. The so-called Reproductive Health Act allows abortions for any reason up to 24 weeks and up to birth for “health” reasons – including situations like what Levatino mentioned. The law also allows non-doctors to do abortions.
Levatino said abortionists have “no state oversight whatsoever” when they determine if a woman’s “health” is at risk.
What’s more, the U.S. Supreme Court gave abortionists wide leverage for interpretation of the term. Levatino explained:
Roe allowed third-trimester abortions (essentially from 27 weeks gestation until birth) if the abortion was performed to protect the mother’s health – BUT, it didn’t define the term “health.”
Few have heard of Doe v. Bolton. It was a companion case to Roe ruled on the same day in 1973. Doe did define “health.” It states that the term “health” includes the mother’s physical health with no specification how severely her physical health would have to be threatened by a continuing pregnancy. It includes her mental health, again with no specification or guidance regarding how severely affected her mental health would have to be to justify a third-trimester abortion. It also includes her economic health. Whoa!! How rich or poor does one have to be to secure a third-trimester abortion? And, if that’s not enough, it includes her social health.
New York is not alone. Lawmakers in Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts also are considering legislation to allow third-trimester abortions for “health” reasons. Other pro-abortion bills recently were defeated in New Mexico and Virginia.
There is strong evidence that women abort viable, healthy unborn babies for purely elective reasons as well. Some openly admit it, as one woman recently did to New York Magazine. Others, including well-known researcher and abortion activist Diana Greene Foster, acknowledge it in their research. And in 1997, one of the pro-abortion movement’s own leaders admitted to the New York Times that he had lied about late-term, partial-birth abortions being rare.
“In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along,” Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers said, according to the report.
Yet, prominent abortion activists like Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen continue to lie to the public with claims that viable, third-trimester unborn babies only are aborted when there are serious medical problems.
Levatino responded, “This abuse of the concept of a mother’s ‘health,’ as stated in Doe v. Bolton, has been used effectively by those who favor allowing women to kill their unborn sons and daughters for any reason whatsoever.”
“It does not matter how ‘rare’ these procedures may be. The fact that they are allowed at all, except in the most dire of circumstances, is a blot on our country and on the medical profession as a whole,” he concluded.
