An Indiana woman died along with her unborn baby in an abortion last year, a fact that abortion activists will ignore in their crusade to legalize abortion on demand.
Since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, the pro-abortion movement persistently has claimed that pro-life laws are putting women’s lives in jeopardy. But state health data shows that women are dying from legal abortions, not a lack of them.
On June 30, the Indiana Department of Health published abortion statistics for 2022. The report shows a massive rise in complications, including one woman who died along with her unborn baby.
“Sadly, the 2022 reported abortion complications increased by 600 percent over the number of abortion complications reported in 2021,” said Indiana Right to Life president and chief executive officer Mike Fichter. “Abortion is traumatic to women – mentally, emotionally, and the state’s latest report underscores abortion presents real life-threatening complications as well.”
The report does not provide any details about the woman’s death, but it does describe the types of treatment that women received as a result of abortion complications: 58 required surgery, four needed blood transfusions and at least two were admitted to the hospital. The vast majority of the complications were due to the abortion pill, listed as medication abortions in the report.
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Most states have not released their abortion data for 2022 yet, but the woman’s death in Indiana likely will not be the only one. Centers for Disease Control reports show between two and 12 women’s deaths per year due to legal abortion in the past 15 years, and those numbers almost certainly are an under-count. Several states do not report their abortion data to the CDC.
LifeNews also has documented many cases where women died after legal abortions. These include Tonya Reaves, Cree Erwin, Diana Lopez, Holly Patterson and others.
Meanwhile, there has been no evidence to support abortion activists’ claims that pro-life laws kill women. In April, Robyn Schickler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, made one such claim. “I believe a six-week abortion ban will kill patients,” Schickler said right before the state legislature passed a heartbeat law.
But Texas began enforcing its heartbeat law in September 2021, and more than a dozen other states have since joined it in protecting unborn babies with elective abortion bans. In a year or more, there have not been any reports of women dying because of these pro-life laws.
However, tens of thousands of unborn babies’ lives have been saved. A new study by Johns Hopkins found that nearly 10,000 more babies were born in Texas after its heartbeat law went into effect.
The purpose of pro-life laws is to save lives, including mothers as well as unborn babies, and pro-life lawmakers write protections in the law to ensure that both are protected.
Extensive research by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that all state abortion restrictions permit “abortion in those rare and heartbreaking circumstances when it is necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman,” including for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.
“A plain reading of any of these statutes easily refutes the false and dangerous misinformation being spread by pro-abortion activists,” the researchers found.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many doctors have confirmed that women do not need to fear because pro-life laws protect their lives, too.
In September, Dr. Monique Chireau Wubbenhorst, a prominent OB-GYN, told Congress: “Abortion neither prevents, treats, or palliates any disease. It has instead as its goal the death of a human being. It is therefore not health care for the mother or her fetus, and research confirms this because the majority of OB-GYNs do not do abortions.”
Other doctors told The Spectator that it’s the lies about pro-life laws that really are creating confusion and putting women’s lives at risk. They accused some of their abortion-supporting colleagues of putting abortion politics ahead of their patients.
