The comment in the code describes it thus:
/* Note: abort is used in a few places along the error paths early
* in this function. This is because (a) cleaning up correctly is
* very complex at these places and (b) abort is used when a
* resource problem is indicated which would be due to much more
* serious issues - eg. memory or file descriptor leaks. We
* wouldn't expect fork(2) or pipe(2) to fail in normal
* circumstances.
*/