Why women have second trimester abortions
Breaking stereotypes re: abortion and showing why it is important to protect this reproductive health right.
Despite those thumb-sucking fetuses you see waved around protests, nearly 90 percent of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy. It’s easy for even nominally pro-choice people to judge or shudder at the smaller number of abortions that happen beyond that mark, but that may be because the circumstances of those women’s lives are so remote to them.
Later abortions are no one’s ideal situation, since the price of an abortion goes up, along with the relative medical risks, with every week of gestation. It also becomes harder to find a provider. But as a new quantitative study from the Guttmacher Institute shows for the first time, most of these women aren’t living in ideal situations – they are likelier to be teens, to have less education and to have more disrupted lives.
The stereotype, says Susan Schewel, executive director of the Women’s Medical Fund in Philadelphia, is that women who have second-trimester abortions are “willfully irresponsible. But the women who call our help line are instead women who often are trying to be responsible, but their lives are so difficult. They have so many balls in the air, and more pressing financial needs – for example, housing. They just can’t manage everything.” And of course, many women discover fetal anomalies or experience serious health problems later in their pregnancies.
