Leftists Say They Don’t Like Late-Term Abortions But Then Lament They Can’t Kill More Babies After 34 Weeks

By Nathanael Blake, originally published on February 16, 2024, The Federalist and EPPC

Sin stays hungry. For proof, just look at a recent New Yorker puff piece on a Maryland abortion facility that specializes in late-term abortions — up to 34 weeks of pregnancy. Sometimes mothers want abortions even after that, which led one of the facility’s founders to lament, “Turning people away is the worst part of our entire jobs.” So it’s not the baby-killing but the limits on the baby-killing that is the worst part?

And they are killing babies. We all know it. These abortionists are killing babies who are long past the threshold of viability. If they were delivered alive, they would readily be cared for in the NICU, often with excellent odds in their favor. These are babies being killed, which is why none of the many pictures included in the story showed their remains. 

No one at the New Yorker seems to have been perturbed by the abortionists’ bloodlust. Instead, they included the complaint about insufficient baby-killing in an apparent bid for sympathy for the abortionists. Whining about not killing enough babies demonstrates how evil deeds sear the conscience, numbing people to wickedness while driving them on toward more. This is illustrated clearly as the New Yorker’s reporting demolishes the usual pro-abortion justifications for, and obfuscations about, late-term abortions.

There are brief nods toward the usual arguments for late-term abortions (health risks to the mother, a grim diagnosis for the baby), but the article quickly moves past them to justify late-term abortion on demand for healthy mothers with healthy babies. As one of the abortionists put it, expectant mothers might, for example, discover that “the person who got you pregnant turns out to be an abuser who beats the sh-t out of you.” That is terrible, but why is it presumed that a man’s wrongdoing justifies killing the child he fathered? Old Testament warnings about the sins of the father being visited upon the children have nothing on modern leftists.

Other supposed justifications for killing healthy, viable babies include suggesting that if a woman has difficulty obtaining an abortion earlier in pregnancy, she is somehow entitled to a late-term one, as if abortion were something just to get a rain check on. Another excuse is that some women may not know they are pregnant until well along in the pregnancy. The piece closes with a profile of “Amanda,” who did not realize she was pregnant until she was about 30 weeks along. Several weeks later she got an abortion because neither she nor the father wanted a child. There were no health risks, no fetal anomalies, just an elective abortion of a healthy baby that was months past viability.

Abortion advocates sometimes claim that late-term abortions are only done in the most dire and tragic of circumstances, but as this New Yorker piece shows, they are lying. Late-term abortions are done for all sorts of reasons, including, as in Amanda’s case, that “she’d never wanted kids” and the father “had no interest in a baby.” So they had their baby killed.

There is no hiding this killing, though the article sometimes tries to obscure it behind indirect or clinical language, such as describing an injection “to stop the fetal heartbeat” and quoting the abortionist as saying, “We induce demise.” What a polite way to say they kill babies. Similarly, the article explains, “A later abortion can resemble going into labor.” Yes, because the mother is still delivering a baby, just a dead one.

These verbal obfuscations do not really hide anything. Rather, they highlight the dishonesty of the excuses and justifications offered by pro-abortion activists — and if pro-abortion activists balk at being described as pro-abortion, this New Yorker article has them dead to rights on that as well. As it explains, this particular abortion business began with a six-figure GoFundMe campaign. And there is a continuous stream of funding from pro-abortion groups eager to cover the costs of providing late-term abortions. People who donate to pay for late-term abortions are, in fact, pro-abortion. 

Pro-lifers pay for diapers, baby clothes, and prenatal care while abortion supporters pay for dead babies, which are what they really want. After all, a late-term abortion still requires delivering a (dead) baby, so why not let the babies live and be adopted — unless killing them is the goal? There are far more people willing to adopt babies than there are babies to adopt. But the dead baby, rather than just handing the responsibilities of parenthood off to someone else, is the point. 

And the New Yorker, its sympathetic readers, and the entire cultural and political class they represent applaud this killing. Their support for abortion has atrophied their consciences to the point that they cheer elective abortions of healthy babies even in the third trimester. It turns out that once you begin the toboggan ride down the slope of killing people because they are inconvenient, it is hard to find the brakes.

Evil never ends where we want, but as the old saying has it, sin always takes us further than we wanted to go, keeps us longer than we wanted to stay, and costs more than we ever wanted to pay. In short, sin stays hungry.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.