Why does the Times answer the question “What is late-term abortion?” with a digression on word choice? Why does the author insist that babies aren’t “ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth,” as Trump said, without offering a contrary explanation of what post-viability abortions look like? Why do several doctors promise that they have the expertise to debunk pro-life arguments but withhold the clinical, medical details of what happens when a doctor aborts a viable fetus?
The reason should be obvious. They don’t want to talk about it. They obscure abortion with euphemism, as the Democratic party has always done, because it is easier to hide behind nitpicking discussions of whether “late-term abortion” is a precise medical term than it is to admit to what happens in an abortion after 24 weeks and continue to defend it.
The abortion-rights movement used this tactic during the debate over the federal partial-birth abortion ban, claiming that “partial-birth abortion” isn’t a medical term — call it an “intact dilation & extraction,” they insisted. But what does it matter? The specific label used to reference these grotesque procedures matters far less than the horrific truth of what these procedures do.
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