That abortion death story you read is not an abortion death story
Assume that people who want to kill babies might be motivated to lie about it
ProPublica this week published a report about a single mother who got pregnant with twins, aborted them with a pill, and then died while waiting for a D&C at a Georgia hospital. Rather predictably, this story is being used as evidence against abortion bans. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down. In more than 20 states, Trump Abortion Bans are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care,” Kamala Harris said this week.
But this is not true. No law in Georgia “prevented doctors from providing basic medical care” to this woman before she died. The state’s abortion ban explicitly allows for abortions in the case of medical emergencies. And the medical dispute at issue in this case wasn’t even an “abortion” in the traditional sense of the word; rather it was simply the removal of dead fetal remains from the woman’s uterus, a procedure not even implicated in the state’s abortion ban in the first place.
For all appearances, what happened here looks to be little more than common, garden-variety medical incompetence: A woman was facing a life-threatening medical emergency and a bunch of doctors dithered and dallied for several hours until she died. This is, unfortunately, common. Doctors do this with some regularity, especially in emergency settings. Oftentimes they are overworked, tired, stressed, and unable to give patients the attention they deserve; in many cases they are rather contemptuous of their patients’ pain and suffering, and are seemingly incapable of seeing a medical crisis for what it really is. All of this can easily contribute to the kind of mortal issue that played out in Georgia. The claim that these doctors were motivated by an abortion ban that explicitly allowed them to save this woman’s life is incorrect. They were just bad doctors, that’s all.
The people waving this woman’s bloody shirt know this. You can be guaranteed of that. Consider this proposition: The people who are okay with killing babies—like the ones who are super gung-ho enthusiastic about it, the ones who base their entire socio-political personas around it, people like Kamala Harris—might also be motivated to lie about it. One should not be surprised to learn that the political impulse to kill as many babies as possible should also contain within it sufficient motivation to lie in service to it. There is a reason that abortion advocates take such pains to speak in code about it, why they wish to avoid speaking directly and openly about what abortion does, why they so often use terms like “reproductive rights” and “product of conception” and “termination of pregnancy” in place of normal, intelligible language. They know what this thing is and they do not want many other people to know about it.
It’s also why they’ll lie about the tragic death of a woman who died while aborting her own children—a brutal, depressing tragedy that says nothing about an “abortion ban” and everything about the people who are desperate to maintain an evil, deadly status quo about abortion. Don’t buy it.