Every case I have read about has been a wanted pregnancy in which something went very wrong. Either the child would have been born severely damaged or with a very short and painful life span or the continued pregnancy endangered the woman or possibly a future pregnancy.
Much of what I have read was in articles about how the murder of Dr. Tiller affected the medical providers in that field:
The Assassination of Dr.Tiller: The Marginality of Abortion in American Culture and Medicine
C. Joffe and T. Weitz: Abortion After Tiller
Carole Joffe and Tracy Weitz ▪ November 10, 2009
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These abortions are commonly referred to as “late-term abortions,” a definition that is not part of the medical literature and that implies, by use of the word “term,” that the procedure is occurring at the very end of a pregnancy. The confusion is compounded by the fact that there is no consensus within the medical community as to precisely when the “viability” of a fetus is reached, and regulations governing the performing of later abortions vary not only from state to state, but from hospital to hospital.
In the case of Tiller, his later abortions consisted of two groups: abortions performed when the fetus was severely compromised, and abortions performed on a viable fetus to preserve the health or life of the pregnant woman. The women who came to Tiller for these later abortions were typically in the most harrowing of situations, carrying wanted pregnancies that had gone terribly wrong or with life-threatening conditions facing the women themselves. Some of these women had fetuses with heartbreaking anomalies that were discovered only later in pregnancy, such an anencephaly, a lethal birth defect in which most of the brain and parts of the skull are missing. Other women had themselves become very ill in the course of a pregnancy, such as the onset of cancer, which demanded a course of chemotherapy.
These later abortions called for specialized medical and counseling services, which Tiller pioneered. Unlike the outpatient services characteristic of the vast majority of earlier abortions, these later procedures took place over a several day period. Patients (and their partners) often stayed in local Wichita motels for up to a week. Women’s Health Services offered patients in-depth counseling as well as the opportunity for group counseling with other women and couples in similar situations.
Tiller himself was a deeply religious man and attending to the spiritual needs of his patients was a high priority. The clinic had a special “Quiet Room,” where patients could grieve after their abortions, sometimes holding the blanketed remains of their fetuses. The chaplain on the clinic’s staff helped interested patients choose among various options for baptisms, funerals, and burials.
More:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-assassination-of-dr-tiller-the-marginality-of-abortion-in-american-culture-and-medicine
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