some info

Partial-birth abortion is preferable in those cases because it only requires one insertion of a sharp instrument into the uterus instead of several. There's no pretty way to perform an abortion at that stage. And it isn't performed very often.

Here's a start.

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Between 1990 and 1997, the number of abortions in the United States fell from 1,429,577 to 1,186,039 (CDC, 2000). The CDC estimates that 55 percent of legal abortions occur within the first eight weeks of gestation, and 88 percent are performed within the first 12 weeks. Only 1.4 percent occur after 20 weeks (CDC, 2000).

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So we're talking about maybe 15,000 moderately late-term procedures a year in the entire USA. The number I've heard on "partial-birth" abortions specifically is about 700.

Another PP article.

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HR 1122 also is a direct attack on Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that protect women's access to abortion. In state and federal court cases challenging state bans on so-called "partial-birth" abortion, courts have found that these bans are unconstitutional because:

the definition of what methods of abortion would be banned is both vague and overbroad, affecting safe and common abortion procedures used before fetal viability and therefore constituting an undue burden on a woman's right to choose abortion;

the ban lacks a constitutionally-required exception to protect the health of women, and;

it does not give physicians sufficient warning about what medical procedures would be outlawed.

Voters favor access to abortion when necessary to preserve the health of women. Despite the claims of those who would ban all abortion, voters clearly believe that women, with the help of their doctors and families, are best able to make complicated medical decisions that affect their lives and health. In contrast, opponents of abortion have clearly articulated a strategy to use this ban as a wedge with the American public.

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Interesting that there is no medical definition.

New link.

Many conservatives (Ralph Reed, for example) have explicitly stated that a ban on "partial-birth" abortion is just Step One. Ralph Reed wants to have Congress vote monthly on the legality of abortion...

[ 31 January 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

Come on, who doesn't enjoy giving away other people's money?

This is very clear.

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The court also said that the law was unconstitutional because it lacked sufficient safeguards to protect women's health. And it called these results particularly troubling because the law was not a late-term ban, but was applied pre-viability, as well as post-viability.

Media organizations were determined to provide definitions for "partial-birth abortion," as if it were real, instead of something that did not exist. The Gallup News Organization, for example, conducted a poll five months after the Supreme Court ruling, describing the law that the Supreme Court had explicitly rejected and using wording on "a specific abortion procedure" known "as a 'partial-birth abortion.'"

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As is this.

I did not know it was already possible for states to ban third-trimester abortion. Or how extremely rare it was. Interesting, no?

[ 31 January 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

[ 31 January 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

(edited to add that I've dug up the relevant section and you can read the whole side-splittingly hilarious thing over here.)

[ 08 May 2003: Message edited by: DrConway ]

I didn't know that about the anaesthetic. I would have assumed anything that went into the mother's bloodstream would also affect the baby.

From Salon, an interview with a pro-choice doctor.

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When this bill was initially introduced (in 1995), the understanding of many of us was that it was aimed at third-trimester abortions. So we responded with information about third-trimester abortions. We said they're exceedingly rare; that they're almost exclusively done when there's a fatal or very severe fetal anomaly and/or when the mother's health is at risk.

Then, all of a sudden, people were talking about "thousands" of these procedures being done and how the pro-choice community had misinformed everyone. What they were talking about were procedures being done in the second trimester, which we never thought was an issue because, as you may know, Roe vs. Wade protects abortions through the second trimester from interference by the state. That's where a lot of the confusion and so-called "misinformation" is coming from. It's a problem of definition: The anti-abortion people think that anything over one and a half minutes after conception is a late-term abortion. We call them late-term abortions after the second trimester....

They're trying to regulate a procedure when they don't understand why the procedure's being done. And they're now trying to stop it in the second trimester ...

Here's a hypothetical situation. Let's say I have a woman whose cervix is really tight; it's really hard to get the placenta out and there's a little piece of placenta still left in her uterus. So she's bleeding really heavily, but the uterus is also starting to contract and the fetus comes out and the head gets stuck in the birth canal. OK. Now I have a woman who's got a fetal head stuck in the cervix, I can't get it out. I can't stop the bleeding behind that, so now her uterus is hemorrhaging, filling up with blood. Now, how am I supposed to get that all to stop? The only thing I can do is to get the head out of the way and one of the ways to do that is to empty it, Now if I can't do that procedure, I'm stuck. I get to go to jail or watch a woman die in front of me. Well, I'll probably choose to worry about going to jail later and get the fetus out of her uterus. It's very, very, very frustrating trying to argue medical technique with non-medical fanatics....

Well, the situation that I just told you, where I have this woman who's bleeding in her uterus, I can't get into her uterus, the fetus is in the way, I'm in an emergency situation and there's a ban on how I can get the fetus out. I'll probably save the woman's life and get the fetus out. It's like telling a physician, "I want you to take the best care you can of this patient but I'm going to handcuff you so you can't use all of the techniques at your disposal."

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Another article.

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Last January, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the federal definition of "child" would now begin at conception, a step, said HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, to "help poor mothers [to] be able to take care of their unborn children and get the medical care they absolutely, vitally need." While it is not clear how a policy that offers health insurance to a fetus, but not to its mother, might advance the health of poor women, it firmly places fetal health above maternal health, and sets the stage for ghastly conflicts of interest between a woman and her fetus's doctor.

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Gross.

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Despite its prevalence in the public debate, the term "partial birth abortion" is not recognized by the American Medical Association or the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The phrase came into use shortly after Dr. Martin Haskell presented an abortion technique called intact dilation and extraction, or intact D&X, at the 1992 National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar.

Intact dilation and extraction is a variation on the most commonly used – and constitutionally protected – second trimester abortion procedure: dilation and evacuation, or D&E. (Most first trimester abortions involve dilation and curettage, or D&C, a technique that uses suction to terminate a pregnancy.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that dilation and evacuation procedures account for the majority of abortions performed after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

During a dilation and evacuation, the doctor terminates the pregnancy by dismembering the fetus inside the uterus or as it is extracted from the uterus into the vagina. The fetal skull, which after approximately 16 weeks of pregnancy is too large to pass through a cervix that is only partially dilated, is crushed with forceps prior to extraction from the uterus. Fetal bones begin to calcify at about 17 weeks of pregnancy, so with each dismembered fetal part comes the attached risk of injury to the woman of uterine tears or perforations by bony fragments, as well as the possibility of leaving a fetal fragment inside the uterus – something one district court judge called a "horrible complication."

In an intact dilation and extraction, the not-yet-viable fetus is removed from the uterus as a whole, except for the fetal skull, which is collapsed via a cervical incision and suction rather than crushed with forceps. In this procedure, say those who defend it, there is no fragmentation of bone, which minimizes the risk to the woman. For this reason, say proponents, intact dilation and extraction significantly reduces the number of times that potentially damaging instruments are introduced into the uterus; it prevents certain medical complications to the woman, such as uterine perforation; reduces the likelihood of retained fetal parts in the womb, which can lead to infection; and, finally, as a shorter procedure, it allows for less bleeding and a lower risk of infection.

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Abortion just isn't pretty, especially at that stage.

Oh, and here's where I found my number...

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According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group, an estimated 43 percent of women in the United States will undergo at least one abortion by the time they are 45. Intact dilation and extraction is only an option for abortions done after 16 weeks, which means it is not a common procedure. The CDC reports that 88 percent of abortions in the U.S. occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy; nearly 99 percent occur within the first 20 weeks; and only about 1 percent of terminations occur past 21 weeks of pregnancy. The annual total of intact dilation and extraction procedures was estimated to be approximately 650 of the 1.4 million abortions performed in 1996, the last year for which data is available.

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[ 31 January 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

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I don't believe that anyone applied the word "abortion" to those procedures. Catholic hospitals did not permit them to be done, but they were done elsewhere when necessary.

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In Calgary, doctors at the Holy Cross Hospital, faced with such a situation, had to load the woman into an ambulance and speed over to the General to save the woman's life.

At the Holy Cross, most likely BOTH mother and baby would have died.

Sorry: it doesn't happen that often, but it happens. I thought everyone knew that.

[ 01 February 2003: Message edited by: skdadl ]

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if I was a bookie I'd be tempted to take odds AGAINST a pregnancy succeeding. It's a pretty risky business when you think of all the ways it can go wrong.

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It is estimated that 5/6 embryos abort naturally.

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Just guessing, mind you. I'm no more a doctor than I am a lawyer (more's the pity, I sometimes think, then I come to my senses. Who wants to work that hard?)

[ 01 February 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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How do they determine that 5 out of 6 pregnancies abort spontaneously if the women in question don't even know about them?

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I believe it was by sampling menstrual blood samples from a cohort of women and looking for fertilized ova.

Actually this might tend to underestimate the number of spontaneous abortions.

(That sounds dirty. Heh.)

It occurs to me that there are probably more columnists and politicians bitching on the subject of partial birth abortion than there are late-term abortions performed in the United States every year. You could probably give each abortion its own newspaper column/convention/speech/radio rant and still have plenty left over.

I think we (North) American feminists - male and female, naturally - owe it to ourselves and others to make as much noise about this as we can. The loony right obviously doesn't care about the truth or women's safety, but the centre does. We should do our best to make sure they know what's really going on.

[ 03 February 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

Most doctors don't do that on a whim they do it because the woman might not survive to have the baby in the first place and the kid probably won't live either. If the birth is probably going to kill one or both of them then ugly or not it has to be done.

Who would you trust if you were unconscious to make a decision to save your life a doctor who was trained to make decisions like that or a politician like Bush who doesn't do anything more demanding than to state a position based on strong
emotion rather than training and ability.

I trust bush as a state's man but only as a statesman and I do not think he ought to be either legislating morality which usually doesn't work or
talking about a medical procedure which I don't think he has the expertize to decide on it. Anyway the president doesn't have to live with the consequences of those sort of decisions because he is a man. I think he should stay out of the debate and turn his attention to getting the economy out of the crapper rather than tell people what to do with their lives or what they ought to believe. He isn't doing his job very well so what makes him qualified to have an opinion of something he knows almost nothing about while his own job sits undone.

So mr president ought to keep his clumsy hands out of the OR and let the professionals and the people they work on get on with it.

With this one person has to die if it is sucessful so if it were banned then the sloppy hacks who did it illegally might get the other person killed too. I don't much care for the idea of the partial birth abortion either but isn't it better that it is done right when it needs to be done for a very good reason and that disease doesn't run rampant due to poorly santized instruments, or poor procedure.

Legislating morality is usually ineffective and does more harm than good even for the most noble reasons. consider what a mess prohibition was. Or today's drug laws to name a few examples.