Jessa Duggar Seewald responded Monday to cruel abortion activists who have been exploiting her recent miscarriage and deceiving the public about abortion.
Seewald, 30, formerly of the “19 Kids and Counting” reality show, said taking advantage of a grieving mother is “severely distasteful,” and even children understand the difference between killing a baby and a baby dying naturally.
Last week, after the Christian celebrity shared the news of her miscarriage, abortion activists and several news outlets claimed she had an abortion. Parade Magazine ran a headline that described her miscarriage as a “life-saving abortion,” and others labeled the heartbroken mother a hypocrite because she is pro-life.
Responding Monday on Instagram, Seewald said her unborn baby died in the womb, a miscarriage, and she underwent a recommended D&C procedure afterward. She did not kill her child in an abortion.
“Women have D&Cs for many reasons, not all of which involve killing a living human being,” she wrote. “The ultrasound revealed that I had a missed miscarriage. My baby’s heart had stopped beating 3 weeks before I had a D&C.”
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The pro-life mother also reminded her audience that every child’s life is valuable, born and unborn.
“Each person is created ‘in the image of God’ (Gen 1:27), and to purposefully destroy a baby in the womb is an affront to the God who created that life,” Seewald continued. “There’s a world of difference between someone dying and someone being killed. To equate one to the other – and to a mother grieving the loss of her baby no less – is severely distasteful.”
To abortion activists, she added, “Even a child understands the difference between the two.”
Miscarriage care and abortion are not the same thing, but pro-abortion activists have been deceiving women by trying to conflate the two. Although the treatment can be similar in both cases, such as a D&C, one involves removing a dead unborn baby from the womb, the other involves intentionally killing the child. Pro-life laws ban killing, not medical procedures.
The Centers for Disease Control recognizes that there is a clear distinction between the two in its annual abortion report. The government data only counts induced abortions, or the elective killings of unborn babies in abortions.
Part of the confusion arises from the medical terminology as compared to everyday speech. In medicine, a miscarriage is referred to as “spontaneous abortion,” while aborting an unborn baby is an “induced abortion,” according to the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs.
Even some abortion supporters confirmed the difference. Dr. Danielle Jones, an OB-GYN who supports abortion, told others to stop attacking the grieving mother and spreading lies about her situation.
“As an ObGyn I certainly acknowledge that the medical term ‘abortion’ technically includes miscarriage. But socially we absolutely do NOT these interchangeably,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “D&C isn’t abortion. It’s a procedure [with] many uses … Abortion is an indication. Her described situation would medically fall under abortion, but socially it’s not used in that context.”
State abortion bans recognize a clear difference between abortion and miscarriage, too. Pro-life laws only ban killing unborn babies in elective, induced abortions.
Dr. Ingrid Skop and Mary E. Harned, J.D. of the Charlotte Lozier Institute conducted extensive research into the issue last year, including analyses of state pro-life laws, abortion, and miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy care. They found that all state abortion bans permit miscarriage care as well as “abortion in those rare and heartbreaking circumstances when it is necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman,” such as ectopic pregnancy.
Skop and Harned said the misinformation from abortion activists, not the pro-life laws, is putting women’s lives in danger.
“A plain reading of any of these statutes easily refutes the false and dangerous misinformation being spread by pro-abortion activists,” they wrote.
