Hillary Clinton Falsely Claims Late-Term Abortions Occur ‘Because of Medical Necessity’

Hillary Clinton said Sunday that there is no restriction on abortion that she would support, and falsely added that late-term abortions “that take place are because of medical necessity.”

Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, Clinton was asked if she supports federal limits on abortion at any stage of pregnancy in light of a bill that is before the Senate that would ban late-term abortions. She said she would “hate to see the government interfering” with late-term abortions,” and claimed, “I think the kind of late-term abortions that take place are because of medical necessity.”

“This gets back to whether you respect a woman’s right to choose or not,” she continued. “And I think that’s what this whole argument, once again, is about.”

As Breitbart News reported in February, a study published at the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute’s Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, found that women seeking both first-trimester and late-term abortions provided the same reasons for delaying their abortions.

Dr. Elizabeth Johnson, writing at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), observed that, in the study, women seeking both first-trimester and late-term abortions reported “not knowing about the pregnancy,” “trouble deciding about the abortion,” and “disagreeing about the abortion with the man involved,” with similar frequency.

“Among women in the late-term abortion group, the most commonly cited reason for delaying the procedure was ‘raising money for the procedure and related costs,’” Johnson said.

Those women in the late-term abortion group also gave reasons for delaying the procedure such as, “difficulty securing insurance coverage,” “difficulty getting to the abortion facility,” and “not knowing where to go for an abortion,” more often compared to women in the first-trimester group.

Johnson concluded:

For many years, abortion-rights advocates have asserted that abortions after 20 weeks are performed because of maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy.

However, wider data from both the medical literature and late-term abortion providers indicates that most late-term procedures are not performed for these reasons.

Previous survey studies of late-term abortion patients have confirmed that most late-term abortions are performed because of a delay in pregnancy diagnosis and for reasons similar to those given by first-trimester abortion patients:  financial stressors, relationship problems, education concerns or parenting challenges.

Clinton also said that after viewing “excerpts” of the investigative videos that have exposed Planned Parenthood’s practice of harvesting the body parts of aborted babies for sale on the open market, she is troubled by “misleading, inaccurate allegations about them that we heard from Republicans at their debate.”

The Democrat 2016 contender said she thinks that by harvesting and selling the body parts of aborted babies, Planned Parenthood was contributing to fetal research for “cures to Parkinson’s, for example,” and that, “so far as I am aware, what they did, despite the way it was portrayed, is within the laws that were set up for this.”