Throughout this election cycle, the term “late-term abortion” has popped up several times, despite not being an actual medical term. Not only did the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump include a very misinformed discussion about “late-term abortions” before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, but the Republican Party adopted a “Make America Great Again” policy platform ahead of its national convention, stating in a 16-page document that the party will oppose "late-term abortion.”
This isn’t the first time anti-abortion advocates have made it seem as if abortions were happening well into the third trimester of pregnancy or after an infant has been born. As Salon has previously reported, the term is nothing more than a made-up phrase that has no basis in medicine yet is frequently used by anti-abortion advocates.
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2021 about 81 percent of abortions in the U.S. occurred at nine weeks of pregnancy or earlier; 94 percent happened in the first 13 weeks, 3 percent occurred between 16 and 20 weeks of gestation. Less than one percent of abortions in the United States occur after 21 weeks of gestation.
Dr. Warren Hern, who specializes in fetal anomaly abortions and director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, is one of the few providers to provide abortion care later in pregnancy. In fact, he is more than a provider, but also a pioneer in his field. But it doesn’t come without a cost to his safety every day. When Salon spoke to Dr. Hern over a video call, he mentioned that he was sitting behind bulletproof glass. In his latest book, “Abortion in the Age of Unreason,” he discusses stalkers, the assassination of colleagues, like Dr. David Gunn, as well as the “why” behind his work.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think we are in the "Age of Unreason?" And why did you make this the title of your book?
As I said at the beginning of the book, we can compare this to the 18th Century, which was called the "Age of Reason," in which people began to discover that you could learn about the world with science, reason, logic, thought and observation — as distinguished from blind belief, superstition, fantasy and supernatural things. That was a very important epoch in human history. But by contrast, we've had several episodes of unreason. And what we are seeing now in our society, American society in particular, is a new age of unreason.
We have people who are opposed to scientific knowledge about the world, and who are totally committed to fanatic ideas of theocracy, superstition and religion, that have nothing to do with reality. And they’re trying to force the rest of us into that mold, and they are completely opposed to facts. We saw this under the Trump Administration with the COVID pandemic, for example. And now, the new Project 2025, [a set of proposed........