One of the most persistent lies from the pro-abortion lobby is that, with the passage of pro-life laws outlawing abortion, large numbers of women will die who could have otherwise been saved by the procedure.
The latest case is of a South Carolina woman named Elisabeth Weber. She told People Magazine last week that earlier this year she experienced a miscarriage, with her baby dying at around six weeks into the pregnancy.
Doctors advised her to miscarry the pregnancy naturally at home, but when that proved difficult, she said she requested a dilation and curettage — only to be told that, because of the state’s “heartbeat law,” she would “have to wait.” Medical officials ultimately discovered that she was experiencing “an active infection” due to the waiting, though she was still told that she “didn’t meet the criteria for a D&C.”
Weber ultimately underwent the procedure. She said she wanted readers to know that the state’s pro-life law was “so dangerous for women.” But in reality, assuming her account is accurate — if it’s true that doctors refused to perform a lifesaving medical procedure because of the state’s pro-life law — the entire ordeal doesn’t prove anything other than that some doctors are incompetent and don’t know how to navigate relatively simple state laws.
The facts are these: the South Carolina “heartbeat bill” explicitly spells out that a doctor can perform an abortion if he determines “that a medical emergency exists or is performed to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” For good measure, the law directly states that both “intrauterine fetal demise” and “miscarriage” constitute a medical emergency that can justify an abortion.
This is the substance of the law. There are no gimmicks or hidden rules. By her own account there was absolutely no reason that Elisabeth Weber should not have received a D&C. The problem was not with state law, but with the doctors who were either too ignorant or too risk-averse (or both) to do proper medicine.
This is and always has been untrue; Every pro-life law in the United States, without exception, contains provisions that allow for emergency medical intervention to save a mother’s life.
This is universally the case throughout the country; the countless pro-life laws passed since the repeal of Roe v. Wade all contain exceptions that permit doctors to save a mother’s life in the event of a serious complication, even while abortion itself is generally outlawed.
Yet pro-abortion advocates continue to insist that abortion bans are dangerous for mothers. To back this up, they’re citing a small number of cases they claim demonstrate the danger of outlawing abortion. In reality, these examples demonstrate nothing more than the incompetence of some doctors who haven’t bothered to learn how to continue providing medical care under a pro-life regime.
The same awful drama played out in 2022 with the death of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who took an abortion pill which killed her unborn twin babies; she retained some fetal tissue after the incident and sought a D&C at an Atlanta-area hospital after becoming ill, but they delayed significantly in performing one, leading to Thurman’s death from septic shock.
Media outlets like ProPublica strongly implied that Thurman’s death was brought about because of Georgia’s abortion ban. But it wasn’t. In fact, ProPublica itself admits in the 57th paragraph that, “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C.”
As with every other state in which such laws have been passed, Georgia explicitly allows for abortion-related procedures where it is “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” Any half-competent doctor will tell you that removing dead fetal tissue very much qualifies for that exception.
(Half-competent media outlets should know this as well, though ProPublica was amazingly awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its dishonest reporting.)
In Thurman’s case, doctors simply waited too long before starting the procedure. For whatever reason — an incorrect interpretation of state law, fear of litigious blowback, good old-fashioned medical ineptitude — they opted to allow the young woman to become ill beyond saving, permitting her to get sick and die rather than act quickly and decisively.
It should go without saying that, obviously, neither of these cases implicates any pro-life law whatsoever. Doctors in states that have banned abortion always retain full discretion to assess a woman’s medical state and act accordingly.
Doctors are forbidden from killing an unborn child in an act of abortion, but they are more than able to perform related procedures that can save a mother’s life (all the more so in tragic cases like Weber’s, where the baby has died, or even in Thurman’s case, where the babies were killed).
We should never fall for this type of misdirection. Abortion advocates who claim that such laws forbid doctors from saving the lives of women should point to the specific part of the law they claim makes this so.
In reality, pro-life laws save countless unborn lives while permitting doctors to exercise sound judgment in extreme cases. This is a good system; it works. We shouldn’t allow bad doctors to make us think otherwise.
Calvin Sherman is the pen name of a writer living in the southern United States. The Federalist verifies the identity of its pseudonymous authors.
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