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The killing of physician George Tiller has renewed attention on the issue to late-term abortions, which make up a small fraction of the 1.2 million abortions each year. Not much is known, however, about who gets them and for what reasons.

Nearly 90% of abortions are conducted in the first trimester, but — because of social, moral and legal concerns — just slightly more than 1% are conducted after 21 weeks.

Some doctors say they choose to perform them for victims incest and rape. “If someone calls me up, and she’s 32 weeks pregnant and knew she was pregnant for six months and says, ‘I want an abortion, because I just broke up with my boyfriend,’ I won’t do that,” Warren Hern (pictured), a Boulder, Colo., doctor told the Washington Post. “But a 13-year-old teenybopper clutching a pink teddy bear who has been raped by her stepfather — I’ll do that.”

At Tiller’s clinic, the late-term abortions involved “fetuses that were deformed or disabled in some way,” the WSJ reported this week.

Stanley Henshaw, a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health-research group, told WaPo that 2001 data from 15 states and New York City suggest that as many as 2,400 abortions were performed after 24 weeks in the U.S. that year. But Henshaw said that number might have come down because there are fewer abortion providers now.

Earlier this week, national data on “extremely” pre-term births in Sweden was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Just over three infants per 1,000 in that country were born earlier than 27 weeks; of those, 30% were stillborn. Of the live births, one-year survival was 70%, with 9.8% of those born at 22 weeks still alive at one year and 85% of those at 26 weeks making it to their first birthday.

Photo: Associated Press

Originally posted here: 
Shooting Sparks Closer Look at Late-Term Abortions