Six of the best-kept secrets about abortion

Yesterday was the annual March for Life in Washington DC.

It’s a good time to reflect on the reality of the mass-killing going on all around us, just as it was good for Americans to face up to the realities of slavery in the antebellum period.  That’s why Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.  Most Americans in the north had no direct contact with slavery’s ugly realities.  So too most Americans today are unaware of the ugly realities of abortion.

Here are some of those secret realities.  Did you know that . . . ?

1. Roe v. Wade says that after the first trimester the state may regulate abortion, and that after viability (now about 5 months) the state may ban abortion, except in cases where the mother’s life is threatened.
2. In this country 75,000 to 80,000 abortions after the first trimester are performed every year.
3. Today abortions are permitted up to and including the due date.  To get an abortion even in the ninth month, a woman can simply say her mental or emotional life is threatened.
4. 45 million abortions are performed world-wide every year, one million in this country.
5. Abortion is the least-regulated medical procedure in the United States. Matthew Franck this week described the filthy and life-threatening conditions in abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia abortion “clinic.”
6. Abortions are still being performed on live babies long after viability and after they have come out of the womb.  Here is  Franck:
   1. [Prosecutors discovered] that on probably hundreds of occasions Gosnell had induced live births rather than killing the unborn in utero as a legal abortion requires, and then finished his bloody work by “snipping” the babies’ spinal cords at the neck with a pair of surgical scissors. These deaths prompted the charges that sent Gosnell away for the rest of his natural life. They were not abortions; they were post-natal murders, and they are the reason the authors refer to him as “America’s most prolific serial killer.”
   2. Where are the other Gosnells doing this ghastly work?  We have little to no way to know, because abortion is the least-regulated medical procedure in the United States.
   3. You can follow Gerald McDermott on Twitter at @DrGRMcDermott