ABC: Abortion Broadcasting Company

ABC gave pro-abortion advocates free advertising last night with its “World News Sunday.” During the report, an abortionist unequivocally stated that late-term abortion is “really a miscarriage of a stillborn fetus.”

Anchor Dan Harris framed Steve Osunsami’s segment as a look at why doctors risk their lives to perform abortions given the “constant threat” of violence they face, as evidenced by last week’s murder of abortionist George Tiller and recent comments from Tiller’s accused killer that “similar attacks are planned all over the country.”

Harris teased the segment “Tonight, we talk to late-term abortion providers who fear they are targets. Why do they do it?” He stated in his introduction, “Why would a doctor take that risk? And why would a woman make that choice?”

Osunsami’s report quickly revealed itself as a propaganda piece. He lamented, “Tiller was one of the few doctors in the U.S. who specialized in late-term abortions, abortions performed as late as the third trimester. With Tiller’s death, there are now fewer than a dozen U.S. doctors who offer the procedure.”

Neither abortion provider featured in the segment actually explained why they perform lateterm abortions. In fact, both avoided using the word “abortion.” Toni Hawkins, executive director of Atlanta’s SurgiCenter, simply stated that Tiller’s death “will make us more firm in our resolve in what we do and why we do what we do.”

LeRoy Carhart, a Nebraska abortionist and the plaintiff in Gonzales v. Carhart, the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, offered a description of late-term abortion, “It’s very much a three day, four day, even five day procedure. And in our procedure, after the first day, the fetus is no longer alive. So it’s really a miscarriage of a stillborn fetus.”

Hyping up the fear of violence, Osunsami also noted that Carhart’s “safety was such a concern he would only meet us behind closed doors and he came with security.”

As if to make late-term abortions more palatable, Osunsami also reported that Carhart “wants America to know that late-term abortions are rare. A small percentage of all abortion procedures.”

Kara Black, a woman who went to Tiller for an abortion after finding out at six-and-a-half months into her pregnancy that her baby would need three open-heart surgeries and could expect to live just 3 to 5 years, defended Tiller and the procedure. She told ABC, “How do you recover from a loss of a 3 to 5-year-old as you watch them slowly die?” Black added, “If people knew what he really was doing up there and dropped this, you know, fairy tale that, you know, you get pregnant, you have a healthy baby. It doesn’t happen like that.”

One can imagine the difficulty of Black’s decision. However, ABC portrayed late-term abortion as the only choice she had in this circumstance when that is not the case. [See another point of view here.]

Osunsami did include a short sound-bite from Tom McClusky, vice-president for government affairs at Family Research Council. “Any abortion we see in the pro-life movement as being wrong, but in the case of late-term abortions, these are children that have arms, have legs, feel pain,” he stated.

Funny how Carhart managed to leave those details out of his description of the “procedure.”

Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, an Oxford and Harvard trained neonatal pediatrician and pain expert testified at the New York federal court hearings over the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Dr. Anand testified that: "I believe the fetus is conscious," and that the pain during this procedure is "severe and excruciating" to 20-week-old pre-born children.

Under cross-examination, Dr. Anand said he believes a less-controversial abortion procedure, known as "dilation and evacuation" (D&E), would cause the same amount of pain to a child. An estimated 140,000 D&Es, the most common method of second-trimester abortion, take place in the United States annually. Washington Times

ALTERNATIVE TO PBA:

20 weeks from conception

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Sunday, June 14, 2009

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
Late-term abortion endangered? Hardly
Exclusive: Jill Stanek puts lie to notion Tiller was 1 of only 3 who performed procedure

Posted: June 03, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

By Jill Stanek

I was shocked and dismayed when learning Kansas abortionist George Tiller had been murdered by a vigilante.

Tiller was a ghastly late-term abortionist, but he should not have been murdered, just as he should not have murdered 60,000 children throughout his years of practice. I pray for Tiller's soul. I pray also for Tiller's wife, four children and 10 grandchildren, not only for their tragic loss but also for the tragic legacy Tiller left behind.

It is falsely claimed Tiller was one of only three late-term abortionists in the U.S., for instance, in the New York Times:

Some described Dr. Tiller as one of about only three doctors in the country who had, under certain circumstances, provided abortions to women in their third trimester of pregnancy, and said his death would mean that women, particularly in the central United States, would have few if any options in such cases.

Apparently, it was Tiller himself who started it. According to The Guardian:

Tiller testified … that he owns one of only three clinics in the U.S. that perform late-term abortions, which are performed on foetuses that could survive outside the mother's womb.

Before I get to my point, I want to make another.

The third trimester begins at 28 weeks of pregnancy, when healthy babies have more than a 90 percent chance of surviving.

Open your eyes to the ugliness inside the abortion industry with "Lime 5: Exploited by Choice"

There is no health reason for a mother to abort in the third trimester. Her baby can be delivered alive as easy as or easier than aborted dead.

In an event I can't imagine, that a mother would die in her third trimester were her baby not aborted, it has always been legal in every hospital in every state to do so to save a mother's life, and it always will be.

But now to my point, the insinuation that Tiller's death means late-term abortions are endangered, as if that would be bad.

Actually, the delusion grows grander. According to the Los Angeles Times:

But Warren Hern, a Colorado physician and close friend of Tiller … said he was now "the only doctor in the world" who performed very late-term abortions. …

Well, no. The fact is second and third trimester abortions are committed rampantly in hospitals and abortion clinics across the country on a daily basis.

Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life pointed on his blog yesterday to a June 1 Los Angeles Times article on late-term abortions that included Centers for Disease Control 2005 statistics:

Nationally, only 1.3 percent of all reported legal abortions occurred at 21 weeks or more gestation. …

Included is a state-by-state look at those abortions. Of legal abortions occurring at 21 weeks or more gestation, most appear to be in New York. That state reported 2,956, followed by Georgia with 1,094 and New Jersey at 950. California doesn't tell.

(Column continues below)

The CDC reported 8,482 babies 21 weeks or older were aborted in 2005, and the CDC's numbers are low, since only 40 states reported. The Guttmacher Institute (research arm of Planned Parenthood) reported approximately 13,000 babies 21 weeks or older were aborted that year.

Nevertheless, of the 40 states reporting to the CDC, 32 reported abortions of babies 21 weeks or older. So if it were true only three doctors nationwide committed them, they did a lot of flying. Kansas, where Tiller practiced, accounted for "only" 459.

When it became public that Christ Hospital, where I worked, committed late-term abortions (as late as 28 weeks by my observations), these others in the Chicago area also confessed to same: Good Samaritan, Lutheran General, Illinois Masonic, Loyola, Northwestern, and Rush-Presbyterian St. Lukes. That's just Chicago, and that's just those who fessed up.

Not much later the Providence Health System, which owns a chain of 26 hospitals in Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington, admitted to committing late-term abortions.

Remember the 2005 story of the baby aborted alive in a toilet at the EPOC abortion mill in Orlando, Fla.? Late-term abortion.

Remember the 2006 story of the aborted baby thrown on top of the A Gyn Diagnostics abortion mill in Hialeah, Fla.? Late-term abortion.

Have you heard the flak about the University of Wisconsin Madison Hospital recently deciding to commit late-term abortions?

Even a moderator on my own blog discovered that the hospital where his baby was just delivered, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., commits late-term abortions.

The reality is late-term abortions are committed pretty much in every pocket of the country, contrary to claims by the other side.

I'm not sure why abortion proponents want to pursue this point, since most Americans find late-term abortions disgusting.

But if they so wish, I'm happy to.

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