Families who experienced late-term abortions share their stories to shed light on this question

A number of women who had late-term abortions have come out to share their painful experience.

Women share that their decision to end their pregnancy after the 21st week was not whimsical, but something they had to do for medical reasons, as reported by Huff Post.

“During the State of the Union, the president told lies about women like me who have been through hell."

Erika Christensen, who had a late-term abortion two and a half years ago, wrote on the websites of several support groups to reach out to other women with the same experience.

Her husband also wrote an open letter, titled “We are later abortion patients,” in which he wrote: “We are not monsters. We are your family, your neighbors, someone you love.”

TRUMP'S CONTROVERSIAL REMARK

Debate on late-term abortion is raging once again after US President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address.

He said: “Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth.”

Val Goehring, a Baltimore pharmacist and mother of two, said she was outraged by the president’s remark. Goehring terminated her pregnancy with her third child, a daughter, in her 27th week last August.

A PERSONAL ATTACK

“The lies, it’s hard to watch the lies,” she said. “During the State of the Union, the president told lies about women like me who have been through hell. I was yelling at the TV, ‘They don’t kill healthy babies when they are coming through the birth canal. That’s not how any of this works.’ That’s a personal attack on me and the memory of my daughter.”

Krista Goodrich, a nuclear medicine technologist in Portland, Maine, had to terminate her pregnancy on the last day it was legal to have an abortion in her home state after doctors said her unborn son had transposed arteries of the heart, displaced bowels, and apparent liver problems.

“It wasn’t about me and continuing my pregnancy, it was about my son and saving him from his body,” she said.