Stop Killing the Defenseless In most states in our nation today, abortion is illegal when the fetus becomes a viable human being, meaning it can survive outside the his mother's womb. This is often called a late-term abortion, which usually occurs between the 24th and 28th weeks of pregnancy. One of the problems associated with banning late-term abortions in the United States is that feasibility is not defined. That is, there is no set week of gestation in which a fetus is said to be viable. Late-term abortions are performed for several reasons: sometimes the woman was not aware she was pregnant until the third trimester, some fetal anomalies may not be detected until late in the pregnancy, a mother may become too ill to carry the pregnancy to term, or sometimes it is just a choice that the woman can make where, for one reason or another, she does not wish to carry on with the pregnancy. Although according to Susan Dwyer, professor of philosophy and author of numerous books, late or third trimester abortions "represent less than 1% of all terminated pregnancies in the United States, approximately six hundred per year" (56), the process of late-term abortion, the emotional and physical pain suffered by the mother and the pain felt by the child are completely inhumane and must be completely banned. Third-trimester or late-term abortions are usually procedures that take two or three days to complete. The abortion itself is performed on the second or third day once the cervix has dilated enough to ensure the fetus can be safely extracted or expelled. In most cases, fetal death occurs on the first day of insertion of the laminaria, being "a cone of dried algae that swells by absorbing water and thus dilates the cervix non-traumatically in preparation for induced abortion or labor induced" (Dwyer 89). The drugs used during this procedure are digoxin and lidocaine, which are inserted directly into the uterus. Once dilation is complete, late-term abortions usually take two to four hours and are performed with intravenous sedation or general anesthesia. Some babies, however, did not die before the abortion began. Nurse Brenda Shafer recounts one particular abortion in which the doctor "delivered the baby's body and arms, everything except the head. The doctor held the baby's head just inside the uterus. The baby's little fingers were clutching and they opened, and his feet were kicking.