During the third and final presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace straight-up asked Donald Trump if he’d appoint anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court who would work to overturn Roe v. Wade. Trump said that he would, and when Clinton passionately defended a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, Trump responded by spreading dangerous misinformation about abortions.
“If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother,” he said.
Alyson Draper, a corporate attorney who lives in Utah, said she was “outraged” by Trump’s comments, so she used her own Facebook page to detail what a late-term abortion is actually like. (As she notes, so-called “partial-birth abortions” have been illegal in the U.S. for more than a decade.)
“I had a late-term abortion,” she wrote. “It is nothing like [what was] described by Trump. Please don’t base your vote on the fear-mongering he is doing.” She goes on:
I had to have a late term abortion. It was the worst moment in my life. What made it even worse was the State of Utah had made it illegal.
I had one dead twin. The other had severe Spina Bifida. It was so bad that his brain had developed outside his head, and his spine was open clear to the lumbar level. There was ZERO hope, and no medical miracle that could save him. Our dreams were shattered. These twins were from IVF. I was forty, and there would be no more pregnancies.
The abortion was terrible. It was done very gently, by Caesarean section, leaving the babies in their amniotic sacs. The living baby passed very quickly.
She goes on to refute what she says are common arguments she’s heard to explain away her own abortion:
Since I posted this, many have said “That wasn’t an abortion.” Yes, it was. In simple terms and in this case, “Abortion” means “to remove a fetus from the uterus.” “Abortion” is not a specific procedural method. Even a miscarriage is called a “Spontaneous Abortion.”
Others have said, “Your situation wasn’t typical.” Yes, it was very typical. Women don’t have abortions in late term for convenience. There are outliers, to be sure. But my case, one of medical necessity, is typical.
“I was so outraged and so hurt for all the women who had gone through this, and their husbands and partners,” Draper told the Huffington Post. “To hear him talk about it like that was such a disservice.”
