In my article on the homepage this morning, I noted that abortion supporters over the past week have claimed that abortion regulations will make it impossible for women to obtain care for miscarriages. Naturally, my critics have responded to the piece by insisting that . . . pro-life laws will make it impossible for women to get care for miscarriages.
From these critics, who surely know better, this assertion is an obvious effort to distract from the extremism of what abortion supporters want: abortion on demand, throughout all nine months of pregnancy. This falsehood about miscarriage care — like the falsehoods about treatment for ectopic pregnancies or the smear about “forced birth” — is intentionally designed to mislead neutral readers, and pro-lifers should reject it as the baseless distraction that it is.
There isn’t a pro-life law anywhere in the country that prohibits care for women who have suffered a miscarriage. I am unaware of any pro-lifer who has advocated criminalizing such treatment, nor I am aware of any proposed legislation that would do so. If such legislation did exist, every pro-lifer I know would oppose it, because, quite obviously, miscarriage and abortion are different.
Proponents of this falsehood get away with it only by ignoring the fact that, again, there isn’t a single pro-life law criminalizing miscarriage care. They get around this fact by implying that women who suffer miscarriages will face undue questioning from doctors prior to receiving care. Or they claim that laws prohibiting chemical abortions make it impossible for women to obtain drugs sometimes used to treat miscarriages. Or they claim that laws banning dilation-and-evacuation abortions will make it impossible for women to receive treatment for miscarriages later in pregnancy.
For instance, this article from NPR insinuates based on hearsay that, because some pharmacies in Texas might not know whether certain drugs will be used for chemical abortion or for miscarriage treatment, they are hesitant to fill prescriptions. But contrast this insinuation with what John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, told NPR about the Texas law:
[Seago] described this type of hesitation as “an awful misunderstanding of the law.” Even before the passage of the two bills, existing Texas law stated that the act is not an abortion if it involves the treatment of an ectopic pregnancy — which most commonly occurs when the pregnancy grows in the fallopian tube — or to “remove a dead, unborn child whose death was caused by spontaneous abortion [ie, a miscarriage],” he said, pointing to the statute. Another area of Texas law that Seago cited provides an exception to the state’s abortion restrictions if the mother’s life is in danger or she’s at “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” unless an abortion is performed.
In other words, these claims from abortion supporters are nonsense. It is entirely reasonable for doctors to ask a woman suffering a miscarriage if she’s taken abortion-inducing drugs — and even if her answer is yes, there isn’t a single pro-life law in the country that would punish her for having done so. Laws that prohibit chemical abortion do not prohibit doctors from prescribing similar drugs to women if they are needed to manage a miscarriage, nor do they prohibit pharmacies from filling such prescriptions. And laws against D&E abortions do not prohibit doctors from using the same procedure to care for a woman who has suffered a miscarriage later in pregnancy; the distinction, of course, is that in an abortion, the procedure first intentionally kills the living child before removing him from the womb, whereas in a miscarriage, the child has already perished from natural causes.
To claim that pro-lifers want to obstruct miscarriage care — or to insinuate, for instance, that difficulty in obtaining a prescription is the same thing as a ban on miscarriage care, as Mark Joseph Stern did this morning — is grossly irresponsible. It is blatant fearmongering that does an injustice not only to people seeking accurate information but likely also in some cases to women who are seeking care and can’t tell whether they’ll be able to receive it. This fearmongering is aimed at, as I said in my piece this morning, distracting from the horrifying reality of abortion supporters’ preferred policies.