Late Term Abortion Legislation Is A Gross Waste Of Time And Money

Did you know that barely 1% of abortions happen in the third trimester? There is absolutely no way the average person would assume this, because anti-choice Republicans spend so much time crafting legislation that deals with late-term abortions. Florida Governor Rick Scott just passed a bill that makes abortion illegal in Florida at any point in a woman’s pregnancy if her doctor determines that the fetus could survive outside the womb. Since nearly 90% of abortions happen in the first 12 weeks, long before a fetus has a viable chance of survival outside the womb, what is the actual purpose of this legislation? I’ll tell you what it is; to perpetuate the myth that women seeking abortions are careless women, willy-nilly making decisions in the eleventh hour. The entire purpose of these bills is to drum up a complete fallacy – that America actually has a problem with late term abortions. We don’t. They hardly ever happen.

What an egregious waste of time and money. 41 states prohibit abortions after a certain point in pregnancy, but at the point in which they prohibit them, nearly all abortions are taking place to save the life of the mother, or because there are serious genetic abnormalities.

So 41 states have deemed it necessary to craft legislation that only speaks to less than two percent of abortion procedures. Why? So the anti-choice movement can break out their posters of 32-week-old fetuses and try to get people to actually believe that there are massive amounts of abortions happening in which there is a fully formed human winking at the doctor. Bullshit. This is what a seven-week-old embryo looks like:

Do you recognize this little guy from your friendly, neighborhood anti-choice rally? Of course you don’t. Yet this is what 63% of aborted embryos look like. They prefer to go with something like this image:

All of this legislation just gives me a rage headache. It’s pointless, it’s unneeded, and it chips away at a woman’s bodily autonomy for no reason. If you find yourself thinking, “I am NOT okay with a woman having an abortion in the third trimester,” relax. It is unbelievably rare. And in most cases what you would really be saying is “I am not okay with a woman choosing to stay alive.”

(photo: guttmacher.org)