The New Hampshire Senate passed an amendment to ban late-term abortions on viable unborn babies Thursday as part of the state budget.
New Hampshire is one of a handful of states that allows abortions up to birth, but the newly-elected Republican legislature is working to change that.
On Thursday, the 2021-2022 budget passed the state Senate with an amendment to prohibit abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, the New Hampshire Union Leader reports.
The pro-life legislation appears likely to pass. The state House passed a late-term abortion ban in March, and Gov. Chris Sununu, though pro-abortion, said he will not veto the budget because of it.
“I’m a pro-choice governor, but like most citizens of the state of New Hampshire, I do not think that we should be doing a late-term … at the very-last-minute-type abortions,” Sununu said Thursday in an interview with a Concord radio station. “So, no, I wouldn’t necessarily veto a budget over that.”
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His spokesman, Benjamin Vihstadt, also confirmed that the governor, like most Americans, supports protections for viable, late-term unborn babies, according to the report.
“… he’s not going to veto an entire state budget over a change that would bring NH in line with 43 other states, and any claim that this is a radical restriction is just partisan politics,” Vihstadt said.
The amendment would prohibit abortions after 24 weeks when unborn babies are viable outside the womb. Exceptions would be allowed if the mother’s life is at risk. Abortionists who violate the legislation could face felony charges that include up to seven years in prison.
During an emotional debate on the state Senate floor this week, state Sen. Sharon Carson, R-Londonderry, advocated for the rights of unborn babies, the AP reports. Carson said her daughter was born with spina bifida, and doctors predicted that she would not live to her first birthday; she now is 41.
“I’m going to tell you all right now that I would not trade one day, one day of not having her in my life,” she said. “We need to be very, very careful about what we’re talking about here. You’re trying to take away the chance of that child to have a life.”
Approximately 9,000 viable, late-term unborn babies are aborted every year in the United States, based on research by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
Seven states allow unborn babies to be aborted through all nine months of pregnancy and have done so for years. The states are Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont, along with Washington, D.C.
According to a 2020 investigation by Operation Rescue, 143 abortion facilities in the U.S. will abort unborn babies at 20 weeks of pregnancy or more.
What’s more, abortion lobbyists admit that most late-term abortions are done on healthy mothers carrying healthy babies. Guttmacher Institute statistics confirm that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” Instead, data suggest that “most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.”
Late-term abortionist Martin Haskell, who is credited with popularizing the partial-birth abortion procedure, said in a 1993 interview with American Medical News: “I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range…. In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective.”
New York Magazine recently featured the story of an Oregon woman who aborted her unborn baby at 28 weeks of pregnancy for purely elective reasons; both she and her unborn baby were healthy.
