The Colorado Constitution. It was referred to the ballot. Was that referred to the ballot by the I think it was referred Was it signatures? How did this get We'll find out with our next guests, because joining me now the vice president of the American Association of Pro Life Obstetrician Gynecologists in Colorado and president of Democrats for Life of Colorado, Tom Perril, is with us doctor Tom Perril and Wendy Smooth. Wendy Smooth, See what did I have,
Wendy Smith? I literally said, Wendy, your name's easy. I won't mess that up. Wendy Smith, who was a retired acute care nurse practitioner, there on to talk about why Amendment seventy nine is a bad idea, and I want to start with you, Tom. What would this amendment do compared to what we have in law right now?
The amendment would make unrestricted abortion to constitutional right, and it would also facilitate taxpayer funding, which are two new things. It has several other unattended consequences, which includes eliminating prinal notification, which is one of the only laws on the books in Colorado pertaining to abortion, and so parents would not be notified in advance of their team daughter's abortion.
And.
It would preclude the legislators of Colorado's coming back and modifying the restrictions on abortion to address the late abortion issue which is occurring at ever increasing numbers here in Colorado on healthy women with healthy babies.
When you say late term abortion, what do you mean and what does that mean? I want to be clear because I think most people that is such a bland euphemism for what actually happens there. So what is considered a late term abortion?
We use the term late abortions because late term is sort of controversial, but late abortions typically are after the first semester. In particularly, I'm talking about post viability abortions after twenty one weeks, which is the absolute limit of fetal viability in the United States. Today, there are babies actually born at some centers like the University of Iowa at twenty one weeks. Currently, twenty two weeks is the standard for offering resussitive measures for a pre met but
as early as twenty one weeks babies can survive. So when I'm talking about late abortions, I'm talking about after the point of fetal viability and the methodology used for those abortions is different than first trimester abortions, and it represents substantially more risk to the mother. You may know that D and E abortions are the standard in the second trimester up until about twenty four weeks and DN
E abortions. You know, this is difficult to discuss, but it involves taking the fetus apart is membering it to extract it from the uterus. In the process, the fetus is killed, and usually that's done without the benefit of any anesthesia or by a fetus side prior to the dismemberment, which means that the fetus will feel that pain fairly
acutely and later later in pregnancy. Go ahead, I was gonna say in the third timemester, more commonly, what happens is the the fetus is injected with poison, in this case the Jockson, which is a chemical drug that's used for heart failure patients and people with party rhythmias, but in a massive overdose it causes nausea, vomiting, wretching, abdominal pain, delirium, and we know that that happens in infants as well, So there's every reason to believe when when we inject
the jockson of the fetus, it takes at least minutes up to twenty four hours to kill the fetus, and so it's a very tortuous death and people are unaware of that as well.
And then do they deliver the dead baby? What is the process there?
Not?
I mean, I'm not trying to be too graphic, but I got to tell you, guys, I think one of the reasons that people are willing to accept late abortion is because they've sanitized what it actually is. Right, we don't talk about what it actually is that we're talking about. We've allowed it to become ending a pregnancy instead of ending life, which is what it's doing. So I'm gonna if you're squeamish, you may want to turn away from the station for a moment, But I'd like to know
do they deliver the baby hole at that point? How do they get a twenty six twenty eight week baby out of the mother after they after they kill it.
It's a several day procedure and they use serial dilations of the cervix to just accommodate the size of the baby. And then typically on the third or fourth day, when it's in the you know, late later in the third trimester, they give a drive to make the uterus contract, and then they use instruments as well to extract the dead fetus.
They kill the fetus on the first day, they extract it on the third or fourth day, and uh, when they extract it, sometimes the fetus comes out intact, and sometimes it's also this member, depending on the difficulty they have in extracting the fetus.
So it seems to me and doctor Terrill and then I'll get to you in just a second, Wendy, I promise. I spoke to my own obg yn about what health situations would be existing where the termination of a pregnancy in late later months is necessary to save the life of the mother. When I was like, can't you just
either deliver the baby alive? And she didn't have a good answer for me, and we had a long conversation, but she said, it's just a really tough thing to parse this out, So why not just deliver the baby at that point and allow someone else to take responsibility for it.
You know, that's just the point after feal viability, there's absolutely no indication for an abortion as opposed to a delivery, because an abortion, as the just mentioned, takes several days. If you have a medical emergency, nobody has the time to wait several days to perform a late abortion. Delivery can be performed in a matter of minutes. And so if there really is a medical urgency or emergency, it's
actually malpracticed to perform an abortion in that setting. So after viability, it's never necessary to do an abortion to save the life of the mother. In fact, I even called doctor Warren Herne and Boulder and asked him that same question. I said, is there any situation that you could think of where an abortion was necessary to save the life of mother after viability instead of a delivery?
He said, I don't know. Called the University of Colorado, so it tells you here's the premiere abortion providertrue abortion proviator, and you can't think of a situation when that would be relevant. So the propaganda out there that this is necessary to save the health or life of mother is just not true.
So you and I were talking off the air about the fact that a lot of people here in the state don't know that in Colorado you can get a completely optional You decide you don't want to have a baby, you can do that up until the day of birth. That is the law here in Colorado.
Correct. It is correct.
I find that ghoulish, and every time I bring it up, I have a texture of some sword who says that's not accurate. That never happens, and it does. It absolutely does happen. You said you had data.
On that, Well, we know that in Colorado, based on the Colorada Palm Department of Public Health and Environment, there are between fortua and sixty eight and fortune and eighty six abortions after twenty weeks in Colorado over the last two years, and that represents between three point two and three point four percent of all abortions. Sounds like not a lot, but you know that's basically five hundred abortions
after viability. And the striking thing is Doctorhearn from Boulder has published his own late abortion practice Experience, and he says that seventy percent of the babies that he awards laid in pregnancy are are healthy. In other words, these are healthy babies in healthy women that are being aborted for elective reasons. I mean not that they're trivial reasons. Sometimes you know, women don't even recognize that they're pregnant until the fifth or sixth month. Sometimes you know, a
partner leaves them, or they lose their job. But all these things, you know, demand our compassion and our care. But I think we need to offer them more than a late abortion. We should be working diligently to provide them pregnancyvisistant support, you know, treat domestic violence and the other issues that arise that make a woman feel that that's the best option for her.
Wendy, how did you get involved in this movement? You're a retired nurse practitioner did how did you jump in here?
So several reasons. My specialty was hematology oncology, so understanding the science of the growth and development, and from the very first stem cell, I've always really been pro life.
In addition, I have been involved in prison volunteering in prisons for over eighteen years and currently volunteer with three different anti trafficking organizations, and my focuses in minor sex trafficking, and so I've dealt with the issue from several different perspectives and I just am compelled to fend life and the health and safety of women and girls.
Well, someone reached out to me after I said, I hate to say it, but I feel like, based on recent voting on anything, we can't even get a later term abortion ban passed in Colorado that failed at the ballot box. What confidence do you have that this amendment is going to fail? And if so, where's that coming from? Because I'd love to have confidence, but Colorado voters have shown me that they don't want any kind of limits on abortion at all.
So I have confidence because I think that one of the reasons that people have, like with Proposition one point fifteen, people that we talked to, didn't know what they were voting for. They didn't realize that by refusing to limit it to twenty abortion to twenty two weeks that allowed for abortion. It opened the door for vote abortion all the way up to birth. I don't think most women know that it is not women's healthcare. In fact, there's
no any efforts to promote health and safety guidelines. For example, the Women's Health Protection Act HB sixteen twelve thirty one. Any of that was turned down, that never got out of committee because it was perceived as a barrier. So there's no guidelines, there's no oversight, no safety regulations, no inspections. When do you do that?
That's the thing that That's the thing that I thought was.
They realized that that's the case in that So.
What you're sorry, Yeah, no, I was going to say, so what you're saying, Just to be clear here, because we talked about this a little bit before, I didn't realize that they're not abortion clinics are not under the same medical inspection standards as a standard medical facility that has to adhere to certain levels of Clintley's. Now I'm not saying saying that they're all pits of despair, but they don't even get inspected, so you have to go
on faith that they're following proper medical practices. Is that what you're saying.
That's absolutely what I'm saying. The public is dark, and how do we collect data because they're not reporting all the data and if this amendment goes through, it'll be silent. I mean, we'll have no way of collecting data. Currently, a lot of it's voluntary in Colorado, but they don't enforce it.
So the irony is that I was going to say, the irony is that you know, a second and third trimester abortion clinic which has takes care of very high risk situations. We know that second trimester abortions have a ten percent complication rate and one point seven percent life threatening complication rate, and yet which is much higher than most ambulatory surgical centers which are highly regulated, and birth
centers for that matter, which will highly regulated. But second third timester worship clinics have no regulation despite the high risk. It's just amount of time before some tragedy occurs, in multiple tragedies, and we may or may not hear about it because the nature of reporting on this kind of
thing is really suboptimal. We know from the experience in Philadelphia with Gosnell that even prominent hospitals like University of Color of Pennsylvania didn't report some of the women who are damaged and even one woman that died as a result of complications of abortion.
The Kermit Gosnell story should have been a wake up call for so many people, but there's too many people that want to continue to support the sanitized version of abortion that they've been fed. Just ending a pregnancy, no big deals, just a choice, and that I think is what has to be changed before we can see real change at the ballot box. It's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today on the air.
It's why I want to have a graphic commerce sation about what this procedure actually is, because I think that when you start to realize the barbarism of it, it gets really hard to say no, you should have that choice at any moment during your pregnancy. And yet that's what we have in Colorado. And I guarantee if I look at the text line right now, there'll be a person who says, but how many abortions are happening at thirty eight weeks? Great, if we can all agree it's
not happening, let's make it so it can't happen. If we all agree it's so distasteful that it never happens, let's take it off the table permanently. And they will not concede that point. It's very, very frustrating.
Yeah, I know, we know that it occurs well into the third trimester, well beyond thirty two weeks, and in doctor Hearn's published information he has even has one listen at thirty nine weeks. I'm not sure if that was a live baby or stillbirth, because sometimes he conflates the two, but in any case, there's no quest. Then it happens well into the third trimester, and again on healthy babies and healthy women.
Doctor Tom Peril and Wendy Smith, thank you so much for your time today. We'll continue having this conversation.
You know.
I hope you guys are right, but I don't think you are. And I'm hoping that conversations like this at least give someone pause before they support it, you know, and and maybe some baby steps we'll be having a different conversation in the future.
Thank you very much having us.
Thank you guys, I appreciate it very much. We're all gonna have a chance to vote on this