re: #413 lostlakehiker

I can’t give you the source. With luck you can Google it yourself, but it was some mainstream publication, perhaps the Wall Street Journal. Some things I just put in the “fact” book at a certain point, and don’t bother to memorize the source. I figure that facts are generally available to others anyhow.

wikipedia, for what it’s worth Maybe it was the New York Times?

This attitude isn’t the right one for debate, but it’s convenient for knowing what the real world is like.

Assuming that the real world is in fact like that. I’ve seen a lot of ‘facts’ that become generally accepted through repetition that don’t have any basis in truth, but effectively become part of the ‘real’ world through widespread dissemination. That’s how we get KnownFacts^TM.

This original idea seems to come from a guy named Ron Fitzsimmons, a lobbyist who represented a coalition of abortion providers and who stated in a 1997 interview with the NYT that there were many more late-term abortions than the CDC and other sources said, and that they were mostly done for convenience. He seems to have this idea based entirely on his own impressions from visiting clinics, and not from any study of medical records or statistics. There also seems to be some confusion of terms involved - whether he was talking about mid-term abortions vs late-term and so on. As far as Ron Fitzsimmons goes, this seems to be a large story based on one man’s opinion that was not supported by any statistics or record-searching.

However, I am currently reading some other stuff from even earlier - 1993 testimony of a couple of abortion providers. It’s hard to sort through, because I can’t find the original source and can only find the same couple of lines repeated by various anti-abortion sites. The general impression seems to be that it may, in fact, be as you say - though I wouldn’t necessarily say that for sure without reading the original source. However, looking further into this will have to wait for another time.