It absolutely sounds reprehensible to me. Killing a health baby who presents no known risk to the mother …
There is no such thing. All deliveries pose known risks. The risks may be small, but they are known to be possible.
Aren't there risks in aborttions as well? Particularly, 3rd term?
Yes. But no one is arguing that someone must take that risk.
There are ony two choices. If the baby is unwanted, and its 3rd trimester you can abort or carry to term. You must assume one of these two risks, regardless.
From my brief search, the risks are not that far apart. They are within the same order of magnitude.
Maternal mortality in 3rd trimester abortions: 77 per 100,00 in 2023
Maternal mortality from giving birth at full term: 19 per 100,00 in 2023
So, its apparently safer to the mother to give birth, than have a 3rd trimester abortion.
The problem here: third trimester abortions happen when things are abnormal.
Full term births happen when things are normal.
There is absolutely going to be a selection bias because the risk pools aren't even the same beforehand.
You could have asked someone more statistics-literate but you didn't.
You would have to control the initial selection population by the exact disorders/conditions and situations that occurred specifically in the pool of 3rd trimester abortions.
You're comparing situations that have already gone sideways in some way to a population almost exclusively populated by nominal situations. Of course the situations that were so sideways they required an abortion were more fatal on average... And third trimester abortions simply do not happen with healthy fetuses, let alone in high enough numbers to compare the control group.
You're literally comparing ectopic and stillbirth pregnancies to healthy ones capturing the inevitable deaths from an already horrific situation along with the avoidable ones.