There is a lovely interview here with Dr Willie J. Parker, a Christian obstetrician in the USA who performs second trimester abortions, explaining his reasons for providing this essential women’s health service.
Q. Why did you change your outlook on abortion?
A. I wrestled with the morality of it. I grew up in the South and in fundamentalist Protestantism, I was taught that abortion is wrong.
Yet as I pursued my career as an OB/GYN, I saw the dilemmas that women found themselves in. And I could no longer weigh the life of a pre-viable or lethally flawed fetus equally with the life of the woman sitting before me.
In listening to a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, I came to a deeper understanding of my spirituality, which places a higher value on compassion. King said what made the good Samaritan “good” is that instead of focusing on would happen to him by stopping to help the traveler, he was more concerned about what would happen to the traveler if he didn’t stop to help.
I became more concerned about what would happen to these women if I, as an obstetrician, did not help them.
Q. You say women in their second trimester often have the most compelling need for an abortion. Why?
A. They lack access to health care or don’t have an understanding of their body changes, and often figure out later that they’re pregnant. Or they find out early enough that they’re pregnant, but their lack of access to health care or volatile, dysfunctional relationships delay seeking help.
The women most likely to be in those situations are trapped in poverty, often women of color or poor socioeconomic backgrounds, less education, and women and girls at the extremes of reproductive age. Women beyond the age where they think they can become pregnant, or young girls who have infrequent and irregular sexual activity and aren’t conscious of it.
Starting with those women as the ones you’d cut off is kind of ironic, because they have the most compelling reasons to consider abortion in the first place.
blue milk 
I think I disagree with third-trimester abortions, where a foetus would be viable, and I think Australia lacks a legislative framework that would put boundaries around what’s possible re. abortion, because the pollies want to bury their heads in the sand. I also think that being feminist and pro-choice is not mutually exclusive with thinking that boundaries on abortion should exist – it’s not an ‘all or nothing’ question. I hope feminists can have a rational discussion about this….
De-lurking to reply to this comment…abortion is about a medical decision for one person, who may consider others but ultimately makes the decision for themselves.
All or nothing. Whichever they choose.
@Judith: Dr. Parker does have a cut-off point; click the link and see his response to “what’s the cut-off for you”. What do you mean by “rational”, though?
Bravo, Dr. Parker, oh bravo, from this Christian feminist who became more pro-choice after I became a mother (a la Anne Lamott: “It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present.”) – and after I became more aware of the myriad of difficult, not-black-and-white decisions that women have to make for the benefit of their families.
Just as well those particular abortions are essentially mythical then.
Viable foetuses are delivered, not aborted. (Viable = able to breathe with intensive care support; no diagnosis of lethal conditions*)
In a handful of cases around the world in a year, some very very sick woman who would almost certainly not survive the rigors of labour (or even a caesarean) has her third-trimester pregnancy terminated in order to save her life. Other third-trimester abortions are overwhelmingly of non-viable foetuses.
Given such rare situations as these, I’m entirely satisfied that the decision of the woman in consultation with her medical experts is already operating on an ethical level where it’s simply not necessary for me to make generalisations without regard to the specifics of their cases, which it’s totally not my business to know.
*lethal conditions such as anencephaly where the infant has no higher brain functions, rare metabolic disorders where survival prognosis is measured in days/weeks after birth etc.
Seriously! I had a discussion about abortion with a group of women last weekend and one of them, a GP no less, immediately brought up 38 week abortions!
In NZ women who want abortions have to jump through all sorts of hoops, including getting 2 suitable physicians to certify that she is likely to experience mental or physical harm if she she continues the pregnancy. Needless to say, patients and doctors are fudging this all the time.
38 weeks? Has one ever, ever, ever happened? My son was born at 34 weeks, induced because my organs were failing, and I was told then that 38 weeks was considered full term.
Yes, anything from 37 weeks is considered full term. People actually envisage full-term abortions.
I hope you were able to recover, Rosa.
Thanks, Tamara. As soon as I wasn’t pregnant anymore things were mostly fine – little bit of minor kidney damage, but otherwise all is well with both of us now.
It’s terrible to realise that it’s so unusual to hear the woman discussed as a person in any discussion of abortion. And how easy it is to take the focus right back off that again.
What a breath of fresh air to read an interview by someone, a man, a doctor, who GETS IT. It is absolutely the height of none-of-your-business to judge women for already difficult situations and decisions. When people think about second and third trimester abortions they seem to think of this mythical woman, out there, having abortions willy nilly because it’s just so much fun. They don’t think about a girl who was raped by a man, a married woman with enough children already, women with pregnancies where the foetus won’t survive or has already died.
Thanks for the rational discussion (as opposed to the kind where it’s considered some sort of feminist heresy to suggest there’s any room for debate on this subject, to respond to Christa).
I get the distinction between a late-term abortion and a delivery, and of course delivery is what I’m suggesting in the third trimester wherever possible. But you hear anecdotally of such abortions (rather than deliveries) that take place, and I’ve no idea how you could verify the information in somewhere like Australia where, last time I checked, there isn’t any legal framework for abortion, it is simply ‘de-criminalised’. I heard that a legal framework was being debated (I think it got voted down), but those lobbying for it were brooking no talk of an upper time limit, such as exists in the UK and, evidently from this piece, in many US states. All I’m saying is I think having that framework with an upper limit would be a good idea. In fact, I think an abortion law with such limitations in it would probably be easier to sell to a conservative public.
Different states in Australia have different laws in relation to abortion. Decriminlised generally means that as a matter of policy, an act that technically remains a crime is not prosescuted. However in Victoria, abortion has been removed from the Crimes Act as a crime. The Abortion Law Reform Act of 2008 set an upper limit of 24 weeks for abortion ‘on request’ so to speak, and provides that terminations after that date can occur only if two doctors reasonably believe that it is appropriate ‘in all the cirucmstances’. The circumstances to be considered include social, physical and psychological circumstances. A person performing a termination in breach of the Abortion Law Reform Act (for example failing to get another doctor’s opinion or not having reasonable grounds for believing the abortion was appropriate) would not be guilty of a crime, but would be in breach of legislation which could give potentially give rise to a civil penalty.
In other states, there is still some legal framework around abortion, in that most have a requirement that it is only ‘legal’ if it is necessary to protect the health (including mental health) of the mother. Generally, public hospitals which perform terminations will set their own upper limit (usually somewhere between 20 and 24 weeks) and terminations after that have to be approved by an ethics committee. Terminations performed at private clinics may have no such guidelines in place, but will still have to satisfy the requirement that the termination is necessary to protect the health of the mother.
I don’t think it’s feasible to set an upper limit, however personally distressing we might find it to think about ‘viable’ foetuses being terminated. The individual circumstances and multitude of variations that exist make it a subject that it not easily reducible to good law. You may remember the controversy several years ago over the termination at 32 weeks of a foetus with a (not necessarily fatal) genetic disorder. The Victorian hospital was strongly criticised for performing this termination, but reportedly the mother was suicidal. A legal ban on performing this termination could have resulted in the death of mother and, of course, the foetus.
Also, as is so often the case, what is going on legally does not necessarily reflect what happens on the ground.
A friend of mine in NSW needed an abortion – I’m not sure exactly how far along she was but it was definitely after 12 weeks, and possibly fairly late in the second trimester, ie possibly after 24 weeks. She had to go to Victoria, and my understanding is that was because because she/her docs couldn’t find somewhere in NSW that had the facilities to do it, or at least, not quickly enough, rather than any legal issues.
Those kinds of practical considerations set an upper limit, possibly more effectively than law.
Also, to add a data point, in NSW, abortion is still actually illegal, merely subject to exceptions. This site provides a pretty good summary of the law, as well as some practical information. That is also the case in Qld (thus the case a couple of years ago where a young woman and her boyfriend were prosecuted for getting in some RU-486 by post from Ukraine – unless the law was changed after that case; I know there was some discussion of that – discussion which I think proves Mindy’s point).
This is hardly a lack of legal framework.
Do we need to sell abortion law to a conservative public? Last I heard support for abortion choice – with the range of views that encompasses, was pretty much the majority with a loud minority of anti-choicers – with the range of views that encompasses, and a few people undecided in between. I think the public are a lot less conservative, or perhaps more open minded than they are often thought to be.
That seems to be the case in NZ as well. Parliament seems to be pandering to a tiny but vocal minority of fundies instead of catering to majority opinion.