In the course of Kamala Harris’s charge for reproductive freedom, we’ve heard a lot about the 14 states that have banned access to abortion and the 27 others that have restrictions based on gestational duration.

But we’ve heard little to nothing about the nine states and the District of Columbia that allow abortion no matter what the age of the fetus. This basically means up until the moment of birth.

Yet during Harris’s debate with Donald Trump, the vice president averred that late-term abortions just aren’t happening.

Oh, yes they are.

We don’t like to hear about these procedures because they complicate a preferred understanding that late-term abortions never happen unless some genetic or other physical anomaly would condemn the child to a life of misery and/or early death.

Democrats bent on restoring abortion rights would have us believe that no state would allow a fully formed baby to be aborted, and it is rational to believe this. But such is not always the case. In fact, a doctor profiled in a 2023 Atlantic article, Warren Hern, performs abortions up to 32 weeks and sometimes later. Hern estimated that about half of his later-term abortions are of healthy babies.

Hern, 86, has been performing abortions in Boulder, Colorado, for more than 50 years and is one of a handful of doctors willing to perform late-term abortions. This description, by the way, comes from Hern’s own website. Sometimes, in Hern’s procedures, a fetus can be removed whole, but other times it has to be dismembered. All in another wretched day’s work, I guess. At least I can appreciate his dislike of euphemisms. When he opened his practice in 1975, he named it the Boulder Abortion Clinic rather than something soothingly nebulous like “women’s care.”

Hern and company perform a dozen second- and third-trimester abortions every week, Elaine Godfrey reported in the Atlantic article. It took a while for Hern to become comfortable with his work, which at first took an emotional toll on him. In his mind, he would see the tiny fetuses with still-beating hearts that he had removed from their mothers’ wombs. Hern felt that it was fair for him to suffer emotional distress as part of the job, and he says he knew deep down that he was helping, not hurting women. This is surely debatable.

Eventually, the dreams stopped and Hern no longer had to compose himself between procedures, wrote Godfrey. He does, however, have to operate with bulletproof glass windows and 24-hour surveillance.

During more than three decades of writing about abortion, honesty and truth are all I’ve ever hoped for. I’m on record encouraging education over judicial fiat as the best way of reducing abortion. Tell women (and men) exactly what abortion is without all the pretend language about “reproductive health,” which doesn’t always apply. The least doctors can do is to ensure that their patients are fully informed. Yet, when some states have wanted to require that abortion-seeking women be shown images of their fetuses in utero, the pro-choice brigade has fought back hard.

In keeping with his sole consideration for his patients’ wishes, Hern has aborted at least two later-term babies for sex selection.

I’d like to think sex-selection abortion is beyond the comprehension of most people. But abortion culture has had the undesirable, if predictable, effect of making us less horrified by worse and worse. While 90 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester, a majority of them by pills rather than surgery, even by the 13th and final week of the first trimester, a fetus has begun to look quite human. Although only as big as a pea pod, the fetus has fingerprints, veins and organs, which can be seen through the skin, and, if female, ovaries containing 2 million eggs.

If that’s not a human life, what is it? Definitely not nothing.

At 27 weeks, the last week of the second trimester, the fetus’s brain is active, sleeping and waking - eyes wide open - on a regular schedule. Lungs are incomplete, but he or she could survive outside the mother’s body even earlier.

At 32 weeks, when Hern is willing to terminate a nearly fully formed infant, the fetus is settling into the head-down position, preparing for birth. For the remaining seven to eight weeks, it gains a third to half its birth weight, which may be why Hern prefers a 32-week limit, although he’ll operate even later.

So, yes, Madam Vice President, late-term abortions are happening and not just for anomalies or medical reasons. As we’ve learned, you’re willing to change your positions based on new information. I hope this helps.

Kathleen Parker is a Washington Post columnist.