Planned Parenthood President: ‘No Such Thing as Infanticide in Medical Care’

Planned Parenthood President Dr. Leana Wen wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board this week that there is “no such thing as infanticide in medical care.”

This was Wen’s latest defense of her abortion business, and the leader of Planned Parenthood was responding to an earlier op-ed at the WSJ by Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and The View’s Meghan McCain titled, “America’s Extremist Abortion Industry.”

Despite statements to the contrary by abortionists themselves, Wen continues to claim third-trimester abortions occur “because something in the pregnancy has gone very wrong: a woman’s life & health is in danger, there are severe fetal anomalies, or other devastating medical complications”:

In addition to the stories of abortionists, a study released in 2013 by the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute found that women who were seeking both first-trimester and late-term abortions provided the same reasons for delaying their abortions, including “not knowing about the pregnancy,” “trouble deciding about the abortion,” and “disagreeing about the abortion with the man involved.”

The study concluded that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”

“Abortion is not a procedure done in true emergency situations,” wrote Live Action President Lila Rose and OB/GYN Dr. Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, at the Washington Examiner. “The purpose of an abortion is to produce a dead baby, not to separate the mother and the baby.”

The two pro-life advocates said claims that abortion must be legal up until the moment of birth to protect the mother from death are “not based in reality.”

Rose joined OB/GYN Dr. Mary Davenport in another piece at the Federalist in which they describe the likely ignorance of some physicians – many of whom have been educated in a pro-abortion philosophy – who may refer women for third-trimester abortions.

They wrote:

Murphy Goodwin, M.D., a distinguished professor of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Southern California, writes that many abortion referrals based on maternal health situations reflect sheer ignorance from the referring physicians. Typically, he says, they are medical specialists who lack experience treating women with high-risk pregnancies.

Goodwin describes multiple cases in which women with severe life threatening conditions—from cardiac problems to cancer—were told that they needed to have abortions. In each situation, physicians were able to find solutions that allowed the mother to bring the baby to 28 weeks, at which point approximately 90 percent of babies survive in neonatal intensive care.

Wen, however, is now denying that infanticide occurs during abortion, which she calls “health care” – even after Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of murdering babies who survived abortion and politicians such as Democrat Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Ralph Northam of Virginia have brought the word “infanticide” into everyday American conversation with the abortion legislation in their states.

Planned Parenthood’s president has already shifted her narrative from the group’s long debunked “three percent statistic” – that abortions represent only three percent of the group’s services – to clearly affirming that abortion is Planned Parenthood’s “core mission.”

Wen is stepping up her defense as Democrats have grown increasingly cavalier about aborting babies even at the moment of birth, or allowing those who survive abortion to go without medical attention while the woman and her doctor decide his or her fate.

“Safe, legal, and rare” is no longer enough for Democrats, as many more Republican-led states are passing laws restricting abortion further.

“The reality is that, in an emergency, a physician can always separate the mother and the baby in a way that gives them both the best chance possible,” Rose and Harrison wrote. “Abortion is never about saving a life. It is about killing a human being, and it is never medically necessary to intentionally kill an unborn child in an abortion in order to save the life of its mother.”