On the issue of abortion, which Democrats consider their great strength, Vice President Kamala Harris’ only response during the presidential debate to former President Donald Trump’s question about her comfort with abortions in the seventh, eighth, or ninth month was: “Come on!”

The moderators, who should have been the ones to ask the question, quickly changed the subject. Perhaps they are confident that the many euphemisms hiding the Democratic Party’s support for abortion without limits have successfully hoodwinked the wider public. As a physician, I believe that something as consequential as our country’s respect for the rights of vulnerable young Americans deserves both honesty and clarity.

Abortion advocates such as Harris promote three misconceptions (or purposeful obfuscations) about later-term abortion.

They just don’t happen (“Come on!”). 

According to the abortion lobby’s premier research and policy organization, the Guttmacher Institute, about 7% of all abortions in the United States in 2021 were performed on babies at 14 weeks gestation or later. While seven may sound like a small percentage, it is a large number when considering how many abortions are performed here annually. Last year alone there were tragically more than one million. Other research indicates that approximately 50,000 abortions occur after 15 weeks and about 10,000 conservatively occur at 21 weeks gestation or later.

Whatever your political leanings, that’s a lot of abortions on fully formed babies, many of them viable, many of them capable of feeling pain. That’s also a lot of mothers undergoing drawn out, traumatic, expensive, and painful procedures they will not soon forget.

Ok fine, they do happen after 20 weeks of gestation but only because of significant maternal or fetal health concerns.

This claim is widely repeated and believed, probably because most good-hearted people can’t fathom the idea that babies that developed and that active, fully formed babies they are used to seeing in high detail in ultrasounds pinned to refrigerator doors everywhere, could be electively terminated. The fact is that, according to the largest study on the subject (again from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute), most women seek later-term abortions not because of maternal health concerns or fatal fetal disability but for non-medical reasons.

Later-term abortions are done only because of fatal fetal disability.

That’s simply not true since most later-term abortions are for non-medical reasons. However, it is a sad reflection on our modern Western culture that when a disability is detected in an unborn child using prenatal diagnosis, that child is very often terminated, even if the disability is not fatal. That’s the case with babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in utero, about 67% of whom are terminated in the United States. Babies with chromosomal differences find little tolerance and inclusivity in a society that purports to be devoted to these virtues. The problem is that in any culture where children are viewed as commodities, even minor defects are used to justify termination. Increasingly popular prenatal screenings also lead to the elimination of healthy infants because they so often result in false positives.

Whichever way one counts later-term abortions, tens of thousands of elective later-term abortions are performed each year. Harris and her party should take these numbers as seriously as the 2,590 children who lost their lives to gun violence in 2021. They might then hit upon the right attitude and the proper outrage. Surely, those unborn children merit our concern and our notice.