It is cruel to the grieving family to equate the natural death of an unborn child with the deliberate and intentional destruction of that child.
It is cruel to the grieving family to equate the natural death of an unborn child with the deliberate and intentional destruction of that child.
T he latest viral nonsense on the internet comes in the form of many cruel and false articles and tweets claiming that Jessa Duggar Seewald, a conservative Christian member of the family featured on the reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting, had an abortion.
“Jessa Duggar Seewald Had an Abortion, Even If She Won’t Say the Word,” reads the headline of an article at Jezebel. The article told readers that “an anti-abortion celebrity literally having an abortion is probably something that’s worth discussing honestly,” but the article is very dishonest.
On Monday, Duggar Seewald wrote that her unborn baby had died weeks before a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure was performed to remove the deceased child.
Jessa Duggar shares on her Instagram today that her baby had passed away three weeks before she had a D&C, correcting the cruel slander from pro-abortion activists that she had an elective abortion
Jessa, I’m so sorry that they weaponized the loss of your precious baby. pic.twitter.com/XxSLThmeJP
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) February 27, 2023
“There’s a world of difference between someone dying and someone being killed,” Duggar Seewald wrote. “To equate one to the other—and to a mother grieving the loss of her baby no less—is severely distasteful.”
Indeed, saying that miscarriage care is the same as abortion is like saying that burying a dead child is the same as burying a child alive. The process is the same, but the moral acts could not be more different.
But it’s not just left-wing websites that botched this story. Parade also equated miscarriage care with an abortion. Dr. Ingrid Skop, an ob-gyn and senior fellow and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said in a statement on Tuesday:
Over the past 30 years, I’ve walked with many patients through similar tragic circumstances. I know this pain all too well, as I, too, have miscarried a child. I understand intimately the pain of her loss and pray for her emotional healing.
Jessa’s video clearly describes a spontaneous, or natural, miscarriage. Parade equated that tragedy with an induced abortion, which is the intentional killing of an unborn child. Although the procedures for treating a miscarriage and performing an induced abortion are often the same, most Americans know that the two actions are vastly different morally, psychologically, and emotionally.
There’s really no excuse for media outlets’ botching this story. As Today.com correctly notes, Duggar initially said she had a “missed miscarriage.” Today.com notes: “A ‘missed’ miscarriage is one in which the fetus dies (or never formed) in utero, according to the Mayo Clinic, but the [fetus] is not expelled from the body.”
The confusion of some outlets would be slightly more understandable if this were one of those very rare cases in which treatment to save the mother’s life resulted in the death of the child. But that’s not the case here, and, of course, attempts to equate life-saving care with elective abortion are morally and legally foolish. Every abortion law includes language to protect the life of the mother in such circumstances, as was the case before Roe.
It is incredibly cruel to the grieving family to equate the natural death of an unborn child with the deliberate and intentional destruction of that child.