In the months since the leak of the Dobbs majority opinion, the most popular argument from abortion supporters has been that pro-life laws are unclear about whether pregnant women can obtain necessary medical care for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages. Anti-abortion laws aren’t written clearly enough, they’ve insisted. These laws don’t have appropriate exceptions for necessary medical care, and doctors can’t tell whether they can offer treatment to these women without inviting legal action.
Never mind that for decades now, Catholic hospitals, which don’t perform elective abortions, have somehow managed to treat pregnant women with ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages. The message has rung out loud and clear from abortion supporters: Pro-life laws are written unclearly, and women will die.
So I took it upon myself to read every pro-life law currently in place, and I compiled my findings into an article, published on the homepage yesterday. My findings? Every pro-life law has an explicit exception allowing doctors to exercise their medical judgment and perform necessary procedures if a mother is at risk of death or substantial impairment. Many of the laws also contain a section noting explicitly that ectopic pregnancy and post-miscarriage treatment aren’t classified as abortion procedures.
But I might’ve known that the very people complaining endlessly about the supposed lack of clarity wouldn’t care about any of this. The responses I got to my piece all boiled down to one main complaint: The text of the laws doesn’t actually matter. It’s about the “chilling effect,” one activist told me. Others insisted, sans evidence, that these laws require investigations of doctors who care for women who’ve had miscarriages. Some went so far as to say that, no matter how the laws are written, abortion regulations of any kind will make it such that doctors can’t tell what they’re permitted to do.
In short, the activists who have spent months complaining about the text of pro-life laws don’t actually care about the text at all. Even with the text compiled neatly, illustrating without a doubt that they were incorrect about the supposed vagueness and lack of clear exceptions, they simply do not care. They’d like us to believe, simultaneously, that the text of pro-life laws is responsible for women dying and that the actual text of these laws is irrelevant.
How could both of these things be true? Because the people advancing this argument don’t want pro-life laws at all. Their complaint about a supposed lack of clarity was always disingenuous. It was never out of sincere concern for women’s health or sincere concern that pro-life laws might not be worded clearly enough. As they’ve all but admitted in response to my article, there isn’t a single way to craft a pro-life law that will be good enough for them.
The reason should be obvious: They support elective abortion. They wanted Roe to remain in place forever because they believe wholeheartedly in abortion on demand, for any reason, throughout all nine months of pregnancy. They’ve spent the past two months talking about ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage only because stoking fear about women with legitimate medical needs is far more politically palatable than demanding unlimited abortion without apology.
Sadly, their fearmongering and concern-trolling has caused the very confusion they claim to oppose, telling observers all across the country that women might not be able to get care for life-threatening conditions thanks to pro-life laws. In fact, pro-lifers have always known the difference between necessary health care and a direct, elective abortion, and pro-life laws are abundantly clear on this point. Abortion supporters are muddying the waters on purpose, with the sole aim of undermining pro-life laws — not through sincere debate and argument, but through a pack of dangerous lies.