Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of abortion.

Not only are late-term abortions real, but I met a man so infamous for performing them that his name is written forever into a Supreme Court case defending the practice. 

In 2016, Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who proudly specialized in abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, committing tens of thousands himself, gave a rare public lecture in my hometown for Johns Hopkins University’s Medical Students for Choice. My Students for Life group and I knew we had to attend.

Carhart didn’t just commit late-term abortions. In the early 2000s, he trained others to expand his late-term abortion work in Nebraska and later in Maryland, unashamedly promoting and profiting from abortions after 20 weeks (5 months) gestation in a state with no limits until birth. 

By the time I met him, it was widely known that Carhart had moved on to executing pre-born babies by “lethal injections,” poisoning the baby in the womb as a workaround to the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which prevented a late-term killing technique he championed. Until the Supreme Court shut him down.

To understand the procedure, consider this excerpt from Gonzalez v. Carhart that contained the testimony of a nurse assisting with a 26-week (six-and-a-half-month) abortion, a time in which a baby can be born alive and survive:

[The doctor] delivered the baby’s body and the arms — everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. … The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. … He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.

You read that right: At 26 weeks, the baby was healthy, moving, living, and reacting as you or I might at the feel of cold steel entering the back of our skull. Just another day at Carhart’s abortion office. 

Thankfully, the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion was banned; Carhart lost but didn’t quit. He moved on to lethal doses of digoxin, which induces a heart attack, meaning the baby would be dead on delivery. I wanted to hear for myself how he would justify ending these lives.

Registering for the event, I realized Carhart was waiting directly behind me. Inches away, I could hear the tired breaths of a man who ensured certain children never get theirs.

In 2016, several myths still circulated about late-term abortions “not existing,” despite Carhart’s thriving multiple businesses. Those myths remain perpetuated today by Democrats like 2024 nominee Kamala Harris and corporate media outlets more interested in furthering a profitable agenda than upholding truth, as demonstrated by ABC’s fiasco of a failed “fact check” during the presidential debate.

I’ll never forget Carhart’s voice. With pauses for breath and historical side notes, his tone was that of our grandfathers recalling their walk to school. Carhart had no qualms about casually using the terms “baby,” “killing,” or “dead” when describing abortion.

In reviewing the Gonzales v. Carhart case, he noted it’s “illegal to remove a fetus partly before killing the fetus, and then deliver the rest of the parts.” So he killed first. He coldly explained how digoxin, or heart attack abortions, worked: “We know the baby has been dead for multiple days.”

And Carhart confirmed elective late-term abortions included healthy babies. “Most of us are probably results of unplanned pregnancies (laughter from the audience),” he said. “Certainly, if it was an unplanned pregnancy, and they come to the office, I’ll take care of them.”  

His final word of advice to aspiring medical students? “When you’re burned out of doing labor and delivery and OB and gynecology, and you’re 55 or so, you might come back and work in the abortion field.”  

That is the logic of someone who held thousands of lifeless children in his hands: When bringing life into the world gets old, come to the dark side.

I shook his hand before exiting. The same hand that brought vulnerable human beings from life to death, from womb to hazardous waste bag. Nothing can prepare you for that, and I will never forget it in my daily work to end abortion nor in my responsibility on Election Day.

Ever since the Democrat Party decided to radicalize — callously supporting abortion through the ninth month and opposing medical care for babies born during botched abortions, while simultaneously denying it even happens — our vote in November is no longer about traditional political issues or whether we even like the candidate. 

We vote to save lives.

Michele Venditto is director of strategic initiatives with Students for Life of America.