Abortion activists are spreading pernicious lies about women being prosecuted for miscarriages and denied life-saving care for ectopic pregnancies in attempt to vilify the pro-life movement.
They are shouting about it on social media, and some leftist news outlets and women’s magazines are echoing the propaganda. Even some supposedly “mainstream” news sources, such as Kaiser Health News, recently published articles highlighting these fears.
But they are lies. And pro-life leaders are working to make that abundantly clear.
“The abortion movement is a dying movement,” Chelsey Youman, an attorney with the pro-life Human Coalition, told World Magazine this week. “In that desperation, they’re grasping at lots of straws out there.”
The lies have become increasingly prevalent online since someone leaked a draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court that overturns Roe v. Wade. The court has condemned the leak and there is no final ruling yet, but the draft gave pro-life advocates strong hopes that the high court soon will allow states to protect unborn babies from abortion again.
While the pro-life movement is working to pass laws that protect unborn babies and increase support for pregnant and parenting families in the wake of the leak, it also has been clear that pro-lifers oppose punishing women.
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Last week, 70 pro-life leaders released a joint letter saying the pro-life movement never has and never will support punishing mothers.
“There are two victims in every abortion: the unborn child who loses her life, and her mother who is left abandoned by the abortion industry to deal with any physical complications, as well as the emotional and psychological pain of the abortion trauma for months or even years to come,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “This joint letter recognizes that women who have abortions require our compassion and support, not criminalization.”
The pro-life movement believes the abortionist should be the one who is punished for aborting unborn babies, and both past and present pro-life laws reflect that.
No one wants to deny mothers care for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies either, Dr. Christina Francis, chairman of the board of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told World.
Francis slammed abortion activists’ claims as “fearmongering,” saying abortion bans do not limit a doctor’s ability to care for mothers in these situations.
Here’s more from the report:
As for a miscarriage, sometimes referred to as “spontaneous abortion,” there is no language in any law that would criminalize this, nor evidence that anyone supports it. There are more than 600 Catholic hospitals in the United States, and though none provide abortions, all treat ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages without question.
Dr. Francis recalls her days working at a Catholic hospital in residency, where she treated thousands of patients with miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. The distinction between abortion and an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage is clear within the medical community. Laws, Francis said, might outlaw a “certain procedure,” but the necessary removal of the child would never be illegal.
As World noted, the issue that abortion activists and their media allies often neglect to mention is intent. In an abortion, the intent is to kill an unborn baby; however, with miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, the intent is to provide necessary medical treatment to save the mother’s life.
Youman, the national legislative adviser for Human Coalition, told the magazine that pro-life laws do not prohibit these essential medical treatments.
“All of those treatments are done with the intent to treat a healthcare diagnosis. Not with the intent to end the life of an innocent human being, and that’s a very important distinction to make,” she said.
Women’s lives matter to the pro-life movement, too. Many pro-life leaders have had miscarriages or abortions themselves and know the heartache of losing a child. It is not a movement that seeks to control or manipulate or kill; that is the pro-abortion movement. The pro-life movement is based on the fundamental belief that every human life is valuable and deserving of human rights, and that includes every mother, every father and every child.
