humanlifereview.com
2026-02-13
In July 1997, a married couple in Oldenburg, Germany discovered in the twentieth week of the wife's pregnancy that the child the woman was carrying had Down syndrome. The woman was in her twenty-fifth week of pregnancy when she underwent a saline abortion.
In order to truly understand this peculiar case, it is necessary to belabor the obvious. The second trimester of pregnancy ends at the twenty-fourth week with the end of the sixth month of pregnancy. Thus, this wife had started her seventh month of pregnancy and the third trimester - a time period in which it was quite possible, even in 1997, for prematurely delivered babies to survive. (In the decades since, their chances have improved so that most premature babies delivered at week twenty-five will live.)
The law in Germany allegedly stated that abortions could be legally performed through the first thirteen weeks of pregnancy. After that, it was still legal to abort but only if the pregnant individual said she was unable to carry to term because her physical or mental health was threatened by continuing the pregnancy. Banning abortion unless the pregnant woman claimed to be unable to carry to term hardly seems like a ban at all -- as this case would indeed demonstrate. Writer Annalisa Teggi commented on this standard being a "loophole" with "ample wiggle room" for virtually any woman who just wanted to abort.
It is, of course, not unusual that a woman is distressed to find her fetus has a medical abnormality. After learning that she was carrying a fetus with Down syndrome, this distraught pregnant woman claimed she could not stand to carry to term and said she would commit suicide unless the pregnancy was aborted.