As I write on the home page, there’s really no excuse for it:
Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, there has been a lot of viral misinformation spread on social media that women with ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions may not be able to be treated in states with laws limiting or banning abortion.
See, for example, this blatantly false and particularly shameful tweet from Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali:
"Do I abort this ectopic pregnancy to literally save my life or do I go to jail?"
Question women in America now have to ask.
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) June 24, 2022
In fact, no abortion law in any state in America prevents lifesaving treatment for women with ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. That was true of abortion laws in 1972, and it’s true of abortion laws in 2022. “All states had at least a life of the mother exception before Roe v. Wade,” Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel at Americans United for Life, told me in an email. See, for example, the language in the Texas abortion statute struck down under Roe v. Wade in 1973 that said nothing in the law applies to an abortion performed “for the purpose of saving the life of the mother.” The other lie in Ali’s tweet is the idea that women undergoing abortions will be prosecuted. As Forsythe wrote in 2006, states prosecuted abortionists, not women, under pre-Roe laws.
Every state abortion law triggered by the overturning of Roe includes an exception at least to save the life of the mother, but that didn’t stop Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer from falsely claiming at a May 10 press conference (emphasis added): “If the MAGA Republicans get their way, pregnant women could lose their lives because there will be no exception for the life of a mother if there’s a dangerous complication in the pregnancy.”
The fearmongering about ectopic pregnancies is especially dishonest. Ectopic pregnancies, which account for one to two out of every 100 pregnancies, are pregnancies in which the embryo implants outside the uterus, and necessary lifesaving treatment for the mother results in the death of the embryo.
Many state laws, including the law in Texas, explicitly exclude treatment for ectopic pregnancies from the definition of abortion. On this matter, Planned Parenthood and anti-abortion Republican doctors agree.
Planned Parenthood’s official website states that treatment for ectopic pregnancies “isn’t the same thing as getting an abortion”:
Treating an ectopic pregnancy isn’t the same thing as getting an abortion. Abortion is a medical procedure that when done safely, ends a pregnancy that’s in your uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are unsafely outside of your uterus (usually in the fallopian tubes), and are removed with a medicine called methotrexate or through a laparoscopic surgical procedure. The medical procedures for abortions are not the same as the medical procedures for an ectopic pregnancy.
“I personally have treated hundreds of women with ectopic pregnancies,” pro-life Republican senator Roger Marshall, an obstetrician from Kansas, said in a Senate floor speech last month. Marshall noted that the “Catholic Church supports the treatment of ectopic pregnancies.”