The New York Times Muddies the Waters on Abortion Law and Miscarriage

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we implore the media to read the text of, and report the truth about, abortion legislation and hit more media misses.

Look to the Law

A New York Times story from last Sunday describes the agony of a 35-year-old Texas woman (Amanda) who was denied treatment by a hospital as she endured her second miscarriage in a year’s time. 

While the patient had received a dilation and curretage — a procedure performed during first-trimester abortions and miscarriages — eight months earlier, hospital staff declined to perform the same procedure when she showed up “doubled over in pain and screaming as she passed a large blood clot” in January. The hospital “sent her home with instructions to return only if she was bleeding so excessively that her blood filled a diaper more than once an hour.” It’s an excruciating read about a devastating personal tragedy made more painful by the decisions of the medical professionals whose help she sought.

Despite the Times’s insinuations, the case is not an example of newly implemented abortion laws obstructing the treatment of a miscarriage. 

The article draws a connection between Amanda’s experience and Senate Bill 8, which created a private right of action allowing Texans to sue abortion providers for procedures performed while a fetal heartbeat exists, but there is little evidence to suggest that such a link exists.

According to Amanda, the hospital never so much as mentioned S.B. 8, and after being contacted by the Times, it issued this statement:

While we are not able to speak about an individual’s case due to privacy laws, our multidisciplinary team of clinicians works together to determine the appropriate treatment plan on an individual case-by-case basis. The health and safety of our patients is our top priority.

Moreover, both the text of S.B. 8 and the definition of abortion under Texas law undermine the argument that it forced the hospital’s hand in sending Amanda home without care. The bill explicitly states that a physician is not in violation of the bill if he or she performed a test for a heartbeat and did not detect one before performing an abortion. The article — which does not include a link to S.B. 8 — notes that Amanda’s embryo “had no cardiac activity during that visit” or on an ultrasound a week earlier.” 

Regardless, the procedure would not even be considered an abortion under Texas law because it would have been a procedure that removed “a dead, unborn child whose death was caused by spontaneous abortion [miscarriage].”  

Perhaps Texas’s legislature could be fairly critiqued for not being as clear as it possibly could. It can and should enshrine into law the distinctions between abortion procedures and miscarriage care, but any plain reading of the laws on the books should have made it obvious that Amanda could legally receive the dilation and curretage she requested, at the point when she requested it. 

Blame lies not only with the hospital — if S.B.8, rather than considered medical opinion, was the basis for its decision  — but with the media for its failure to accurately report on stories such as Amanda’s. How can an article about the unintended consequences of a bill omit any description of the relevant passages of the legislation? 

For as long as it is the aim of reporters to use the pain and suffering of women to push an agenda, rather than describe the facts, they will be complicit in that pain and suffering.

Headline Fail of the Week

New York Times columnist Charles Blow penned a column on Sunday suggesting that “We Can’t Afford Not to Prosecute Trump.” He argues that the country will “collapse” if Trump isn’t prosecuted. Despite having zero legal expertise, he says it has “become even clearer to me that Trump should be charged with multiple crimes” after watching the hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol protests.

Blow suggests that Trump has “learned from his failures and is now more dangerous than ever.” 

The former president “has learned that many of his supporters have almost complete contempt for women,” he says.

“He has learned that the presidency is the greatest grift of his life. For decades, he has sold gilded glamour to suckers — hawking hotels and golf courses, steaks and vodka — but with the presidency, he needed to sell them only lies that affirmed their white nationalism and justified their white fragility, and they would happily give him millions of dollars,” he added.

Failing to prosecute Trump “threatens the collapse of the entire political ecosystem and therefore the country,” Blow argues, despite January 6, 2021, having occurred nearly 17 months ago and the U.S. still undeniably standing.

Media Misses

— Some truths were denied for four long years because and only because Donald Trump had acknowledged them.

— Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pretended that she had been handcuffed outside the Supreme Court last week. Later, she argued that she had not and asserted that “putting your hands behind your back is a best practice while detained, handcuffed or not, to avoid escalating charges like resisting arrest.” Most every source you can find — from the ACLU to law enforcement agencies’ websites — advises those being detained to keep their hands where officers can see them, not behind their back in such a scenario. 

— An AP story about the Supreme Court’s investigation into the leak of its draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization includes quotes from one figure: a longtime Democratic operative and court-reform advocate. Naturally, Gabe Roth concludes that the investigation should be ended because “there’s just so many other things the marshal’s office needs to worry about right now that’s far more important than the leak.” 

 “The justices’ safety is under threat probably more now than in years past,” he added.

And why, pray tell, does Roth think that’s the case?