James Taranto makes a great point about aborted abortions:

Abortive Abortions "The Bush administration said Friday that it would enforce a nearly 3-year-old federal law that requires doctors to attempt to keep alive a fetus that survives an abortion," reports the Associated Press in a dispatch bearing the weird title "White House to Enforce Abortion-Fetus Law." The New York Times has an even more bizarre statement:
In a telephone conference call announcing the new enforcement policy, [Dennis] Smith [director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations] could not provide a rule of thumb to distinguish a fetus from a "born-alive infant."

This is confusing only to those who insist on denying that a fetus is what it is, namely an unborn child. Once a child is born, he ceases being a fetus and is simply a child.

It seems to me that a baby who survives an abortion and ends up outside the womb should clearly be considered a "real" human being, even by those who favor abortion. It's interesting how often this must happen. Considering that there are around 1,000,000 abortions in the United States each year, even low abortion complication rates will lead to tens of thousands of incidents -- and I immediately question the veracity of any complication statistics collected by doctors who perform abortions; they've got a financial motivation to undercount.

Frequency:

* In the US: Frequency depends on gestational age (GA) at time of abortion and method of abortion. Complication rates according to GA at time of abortion are as follows: (1) fewer than 6 weeks, less than 1%; (2) 12-13 weeks, 3-6%; and (3) second trimester, up to 50%, possibly higher.

Not all complications result in the baby surviving his or her execution, but that's one of the potential complications listed. One percent of one million is ten thousand, which is an awful lot.

Update 050428:
Here's an article about a Florida woman whose son was unsuccessfully aborted.

A conservative legal group has filed two complaints against a Florida abortion clinic claiming the clinic refused to help a mother whose baby was born alive, despite a law that protects babies "accidentally" born during abortion procedures from being killed or left to die.

The mother, Angele, had gone to the EPOC clinic in Orlando, Fla., to get an abortion. After the first day of the procedure, she was required to return to the clinic the following day for an induced abortion. When her baby was born alive, the woman screamed for help, but the clinic workers refused to help her, according to the Liberty Counsel.

Reprehensible.

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