A pregnancy in the third trimester feels real to many people in a way that one in the earliest stages does not.

Those feelings can shape both our personal views on abortion and our public policies.

And yet, it never has been possible to be a little bit pregnant.

If abortion opponents want to outlaw pregnancy termination at any time after conception,

should proponents of abortion rights be ready to defend it at any time before birth?

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

We all come to these complicated questions with our own sets of beliefs and values and experiences.

There will never be simple answers to these questions.

My guest thinks we'd benefit from substantive discussions

around the ethics of late-term abortion,

but that they rarely happen since she says Democrats tend to avoid the subject and Republicans

tend to lie about it. Amy Littlefield is abortion access correspondent for the nation, which

published her article, What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions? Amy, welcome to think. Thank you so much for

having me. At what point in pregnancy is an abortion considered late term? Well, it depends.

You know, late term is actually a phrase that was sort of made up by opponents of abortion. It's not a technical or medical term.

So when we're talking about abortions later in pregnancy, you know, we know from the flawed

and limited data that we do have that less than 1% of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks

of pregnancy.

Again, that number is probably higher because that data is limited.

And we know that there's been research done on abortions that happen after 24 weeks, which

tends to be the point at which we consider a fetus viable, meaning capable of surviving outside

...