Abortion in the Third Stage is Behavioral and Necessary Health Care

Abortion in the Third Stage is Behavioral and Necessary Health Care

By Cara C. Heuser

They travel hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to seek health care. They come with severe fetal conditions, their babies will not survive. Or they are too young to consent to sex, let alone parenthood. Sometimes, it’s their first chance to escape domestic violence, or because they live in more restrictive counties, they couldn’t get early abortion care.

According to most estimates, a small number—1 percent—of abortions occur after 20 weeks, and not in the horrible way people would have you believe.

As I fill the syringe with the chemical that will stop the heart of the fetus, what I am doing is fulfilling the request of my patients to end the suffering, whether it is that of a baby with osteoporosis broken and will not survive during labor and delivery or parents who could. do not bear to prove it. The negative political statement of “getting babies out of the womb before they are born” or “no one gets an abortion when they are close to their due date” is simplistic and wrong. Abortion later in pregnancy is very important for people who need it. For them, politics is useless. They need the care they need.

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Contrary to what people think about doctors who provide abortion care later in pregnancy, all of us who do this work have thought deeply about the moral and ethical consequences of doing so. We have come to the conclusion that it is not only compatible with our personal values, but to refuse would be a violation of our conscience and our work ethics. Conscientious objections, in which doctors cannot be forced to provide care they morally refuse, are discussed frequently—but conscientious care planning receives less attention. I offer third trimester pregnancies because it would be against my ethics to endanger another person’s health and well-being by forcing her to carry a pregnancy to that stage against her wishes and best judgement. .

Within the concept of ethics there is a distinction between moral simplicity and moral clarity. Terminating a pregnancy in the third trimester is not moral simple. Even pro-abortionists sometimes view abortion differently from pre-pregnancy. Conduct clarity, however, it must be remembered that few events affect the course of a person’s life more than the decision of whether or not to give birth and the conditions under which they do so. People seeking abortion care have done their moral math and decided that terminating the pregnancy is the right decision.

People are certainly entitled to judge their own living conditions, yet it is surprising that many politicians seem comfortable leaving this moral choice to federal legislatures to enforce. When it is human nature to take suffering so that their child does not have to, or to prevent suffering in the first place, I have a responsibility to help them with this painful choice, because not doing so would they are absurd.

These words of Atul Gawande hang in my office: “Sometimes we can give a cure, sometimes it’s just a salve, sometimes not.” But whatever we can give, our steps, and the risks and sacrifices they involve, are justified only if they serve the greater purposes of human life. When we forget that, the suffering we cause can be cruel. If we remember it, the good we do can be amazing.”

When my patient is ready, I slowly inject the substance and watch the fetal heartbeat slow down … slow down … then stop. I remove the needle. I hold his hand. I tell him that the vaccine worked. I tell him that I am sorry that he is in this situation. However, they thank me. They always thank me. This appreciation used to surprise me until one of my patients explained that this compassionate care “makes an unbearable situation more bearable.”

Later I make her give birth and kill her. Along with the deep sadness that hangs in the room, I often see love and comfort—unbearable grief but also relief. I hope that having agency and choice in how their horrible situation ends provides some small comfort to this person and their family. All I know is that denying them at this point would be foolish.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the opinions expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily theirs Scientific American.