When do partial birth abortions occur

However, last year HB No. The bill died in the Judiciary Committee. There is no sure way to determine whether partial birth abortions are being performed in Connecticut.

There are two reasons for this. First, there is no single definition of what constitutes such an abortion. Vagueness of Definition. The term ' partial birth abortion ' is not a medical term. Because ' partial birth abortion ' is not a medical term it will not be used by the AMA. ACOG defines this procedure as containing all of the four elements, in sequence:. This is only a small sampling of the discrepancies between the definitions. Department of Health Statistics. In the more commonly used dismemberment method, the mother's cervix is dilated manually only enough to remove the child's severed body parts; dismemberment and removal takes the doctor longer to complete.

In Carhart I the Supreme Court treated PBA as just another method of abortion, largely ignoring the fact the the child is almost completely delivered when he or she is killed. Yet even when the Court struck down Texas's abortion statute in Roe, it had left standing a provision of Texas law that prohibited killing a child in the process of being delivered.

Such laws exist in most states but they generally have two deficiencies. First, they apply only after "viability" when the child if delivered could survive indefinitely outside the womb and PBA is used to kill mostly-delivered children before this stage. Second, as required by Roe and Casey, even laws restricting abortion after viability allow abortion when it is deemed necessary to preserve the mother's "health" and "heath" was defined in Roe's companion case Doe v. Bolton to include "all factors" emotional, familial, age, and so on related to "well-being.

About the same time, he usually administers an injection of potassium chloride or digoxin into the heart or head of the unborn child, to ensure that he or she is dead upon delivery.

On the day of the procedure, if further cervical dilation is needed, this is performed with mechanical dilators just prior to the procedure. Uterine evacuation is then performed. For younger babies this can be primarily accomplished using suction to remove as much tissue and soft body parts as possible, followed by forceps for removal of larger and harder body parts. For older and larger babies, dismemberment using forceps is used grasping and pulling off limbs for removal.

The brain is usually then removed by suction and the skull crushed for removal. In partial-birth abortion now illegal , the legs are grasped and pulled through the cervix, as in a breech delivery. The body can be delivered this way, but the skull will be too large to deliver through the partially dilated cervix. The abortionist will then introduce an instrument such as scissors into the base of the skull creating an opening. The brain is suctioned out, and the skull then crushed with clamps and extracted.

Misoprostol may also be given to the mother to induce uterine contractions, especially to help expel all the body parts and placenta. The most recent data from both the U. The true percentage may be even higher, as the CDC estimate does not include multiple states where late-term abortions take place. The most recent national abortion total from the Guttmacher Institute and its direct surveys of abortion facilities found that there were an estimated , abortions in the United States in Even using these low estimates, that translates into over 10, late-term abortions every year.

In , late-term abortions constituted as much as nine percent of all abortions in New Mexico. The Foster-Kimport study excluded for comparison an unidentified number of women who had abortions for reasons of life endangerment or fetal anomaly, a significant limitation.

Late-term abortion specialist Dr. However, another paper by Hern reviewed 1, late-term abortions performed at 18 to 38 weeks of gestation between and