Photo: Ian McDonnell/Getty Images

Nov 21, 2024, 11:53 AM ET

Do abortion advocates really hope to use women’s deaths to their advantage? Let’s take a look.

Do pro-abortion activists and even pro-abortion medical organizations plan to use women’s deaths — whether legitimately abortion-related or not — to advance their agenda? Are they waiting (or even hoping) for more women to die (or searching for more deaths to blame on pro-life laws) so they can advance their agenda of abortion-on-demand up to birth?

An article published by Vox this week appears to hint at these ideas. But is it believable? You be the judge.

Here are four questions that require answers in order to come to a conclusion:

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Are women really dying because of pro-life laws, or is the media simply trying to convince people that they are — and why?
ProPublica and other news outlets are only looking for and reporting stories of pregnancy-related deaths/injuries in pro-life states. Why?
Leading medical organizations do not appear to have attempted to offer any guidance to doctors regarding how to better understand pro-life laws. This is apparently not the norm. Why?
Are pro-abortion organizations actually waiting or hoping for more deaths and injuries? If so, why?

Question #1: Are women really dying because of pro-life laws, or is the media simply trying to convince people that they are — and why?

ProPublica (along with some other less influential outlets) have been publishing stories of women’s deaths and injuries, which they claim are attributable to the existence of pro-life laws in places like Georgia, Texas, and Alabama. But are they?

Georgia

The story of Amber Thurman (a Georgia resident who died of sepsis after obtaining the abortion pill in North Carolina) was touted as definitely caused by Georgia’s pro-life law; in so doing, ProPublica inaccurately and inexcusably claimed that D&Cs are a felony in Georgia. But as Live Action News noted in a thorough debunking of this story, D&Cs aren’t illegal in Georgia unless used to directly and intentionally kill a child in the womb (Thurman’s preborn child was already deceased), sepsis is a known risk of the abortion pill (as shown on its black box warning), ProPublica wasn’t honest about Georgia’s pro-life law, and much of the outlet’s story was speculative. Several medical professionals were highly suspicious of the story, an attorney noted that a death like Thurman’s could have happened in any state, and Google Reviews of the hospital where Thurman died raised more questions about the safety of the facility itself.

The story of Candi Miller was promoted by ProPublica as well, and the outlet again falsely claimed D&Cs are illegal in Georgia. This repeated lie should have been enough to discredit the outlet entirely, but when pro-abortion media band together, “the narrative” spread faster than the truth. Miller obtained the abortion pill from Aid Access, an online abortion pill dispensary, and had the remains of her deceased child in her uterus. However, Miller’s autopsy showed that her cause of death was actually drug toxicity; she had fentanyl and other drugs in her system. There is no way to reasonably blame Miller’s death on a pregnancy- or even abortion-related cause, based on these findings.

Texas

As Live Action News previously reported, Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain were named by ProPublica as two women who died because of pro-life laws in Texas:

Josseli Barnica… was told when her waters broke prematurely that doctors had to wait until her baby’s heartbeat stopped before they treated her, even though nothing in Texas’ law requires this. Additionally, she was discharged from the hospital a mere eight hours after her baby died and labor was induced, even though she was still experiencing increasing heavy bleeding and tried to communicate this to her care team. Her care team failed to properly monitor her after her miscarried baby had died, and she later died of infection.

Barnica had retained tissue in her uterus; it appears doctors failed to properly ensure the delivery of the entire placenta, and this led to sepsis.

Nevaeh Crain…was seen in two different ERs, diagnosed with strep, and was discharged again and again despite abdominal pain while visibly pregnant along with worsening symptoms. She even screened positive for sepsis and was discharged while still actively septic. This was under the care of a doctor who had been investigated by the Texas Medical Board for similar malpractice – missing or inappropriately treating infections in other patients – which resulted in the board monitoring his medical practice. Crain died after another trip to the second hospital’s ER confirmed fetal demise — yet the attending doctor still delayed medical treatment for reasons that are not clear.

All of the doctors who reviewed Crain’s medical file for ProPublica criticized the fact that a septic patient was discharged and not immediately admitted for treatment.

ProPublica wants us to find abortion as the common thread in these stories, but what’s really clear is the obvious, appalling failure of these women’s doctors to provide the basic standard of care for their patients. Abortion was already the cause of the issue in two of these cases. In most of the cases, induced abortion was actually irrelevant, because their babies had already died.

It appears that Crain’s parents blame the hospitals’ “medical negligence” for her death.

Alabama

The Meteor posted a story about a woman in which the outlet not only misreported the state’s pro-life law; it showed how a woman’s doctors didn’t even know their own state’s law. Practicing physicians are expected to know and abide by state and federal laws, as OB/GYN Dr. Ingrid Skop recently noted in a Facebook video. Tamara Costa’s baby was diagnosed with a “lethal anomaly.” Under Alabama law, “abortion” as defined by state law does not apply when a preborn child has a “lethal anomaly.”

Despite this, Costa’s OB/GYN sent her all the way to Chicago, Illinois, for an abortion; there, the abortionist diagnosed Costa with a partial molar pregnancy, which had not been diagnosed earlier but was potentially the cause of her child’s “lethal anomaly.” The condition requires immediate medical attention, and because Planned Parenthood in Chicago was not equipped to offer a blood transfusion if needed, Costa was sent to a nearby hospital for the abortion. Costa survived.

The Meteor blamed the state’s pro-life law for this harrowing situation, when in reality, it appears that multiple things exacerbated the situation, including a failure to diagnose a health condition, and doctor’s ignorance of their own state’s law and its exceptions/allowances is what exacerbated the situation.

Question #2: ProPublica and other news outlets are only looking for and reporting stories of pregnancy-related deaths/injuries in pro-life states. Why?

This should be glaringly obvious: if a journalistic outlet is attempting to claim that pro-life laws are harming women as evidenced by pregnancy-related deaths in those states, then it would be proper to compare those deaths to the pregnancy-related deaths occurring in pro-abortion states. Otherwise, put simply, that outlet is promoting propaganda, because there’s no comparison.

The likely goal is to get the public to believe that pro-life laws are killing women, because if they can accomplish this goal, more people will inaccurately blame pro-life laws — laws which were put in place to protect hundreds of thousands of innocent human lives across the country every year, most of whom are electively killed — for the deaths of women in rare emergency situations.

The pro-abortion agenda is to get the public to believe that real healthcare just can’t happen unless medical professionals have full and free reign to kill preborn children in any imaginable circumstance. They want to public to believe that without license to intentionally and directly kill preborn children, women will die. It’s the same lie that was told in order to get Roe v. Wade instituted in 1973 — same playbook, different decade.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, power players like Dr. Bernard Nathanson, an abortionist who later became pro-life, quite literally fabricated statistics about women allegedly dying from illegal abortions. Nathanson later admitted that these figures were completely made up; after all, since the advent of antibiotics decades before Roe, and the fact that it was largely doctors who were doing these illegal abortions clandestinely, deaths from abortions had already been plummeting in the decades prior to Roe. And the abortion lobby already knows this. According to Live Action research fellow Carole Novielli, “Even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute writes that by 1950, ‘just over 300’ women died from illegal abortion, adding that it was most likely ‘because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion.'”

ProPublica isn’t interested in investigating women’s deaths in pro-abortion states, because it has an admitted agenda. The outlet is only looking at pro-life states, and openly admitted this, writing that it is looking for information “about the consequences of abortion bans” and nothing more.

Even the Associated Press was more honest in a recent report, writing, “Serious violations that jeopardized a mother or her fetus’ heath occurred in states with and without abortion bans….”

As Live Action News reported, deaths from sepsis after taking the abortion pill have occurred in both pro-abortion and pro-life jurisdictions.

Question #3: Leading medical organizations do not appear to have attempted to offer any guidance regarding how to better understand pro-life laws. This is apparently not the norm. Why?

In the aforementioned Facebook video, Dr. Ingrid Skop, Texas OB/GYN and VP of Medical Affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, noted that typically, medical organizations give their members guidance on how to navigate new regulations. This did not happen when pro-life laws were passed.

Skop stated:

Doctors are not attorneys. We have always relied on our professional medical associations to explain new laws that impact the practice of medicine, and this happens commonly. The Affordable Care Act, the HIPAA privacy regulations, even the opioid prescribing changes… do have also significant punishments involved. So this is not the first time that doctors have seen a significant concern from the law that they need to obey the law.

But every time what has happened is our medical organizations have explained the law to us. In fact, nearly every year, I am required to take mandatory CME [continuing medical education] to make sure I still remember how to prescribe opioids. So this is how it works in medicine.

But this time it did not work this way. None of the medical organizations voluntarily helped the doctors understand the law, and in fact, sometimes they were stirring up the confusion and fear themselves… and then when doctors did become confused and provide sub-quality care… then that’s being pointed at as demonstration that the laws are confusing….

Was this intentional on the part of these medical organizations, some of which (like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) are so beholden to pro-abortion ideology to the point of even denying long-accepted scientific fact when it comes to prenatal human development?

Question #4: Are pro-abortion organizations actually waiting or hoping for more deaths and injuries? If so, why?

Vox writer Rachel M. Cohen reported in an article this week that pro-abortion groups are not seeking any compromise whatsoever on abortion. They want zero restrictions on the killing of preborn children. Cohen wrote:

… when asked whether they would consider seeking federal protections for abortion exceptions during Republican control as a harm reduction measure, established advocacy groups showed no interest, pointing to patients like Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski who almost lost their lives or fertility despite state bans with exceptions.

“As we are seeing across the country, exceptions often don’t work in practice, so people should not take comfort in those or rely on them,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief government and external relations officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox.

Planned Parenthood Action Fund was even more direct, telling Vox in an email that “narrow health exceptions or those that focus only on emergencies are a disservice to patients and their health care providers because every pregnancy is unique.”

Cohen then made a very astute observation (emphasis added):

This position stems from a core belief: that any engagement with exceptions would validate the broader framework of restrictions. Some doctors on the ground in states with restrictive bans have bemoaned the lack of support they’ve received for carving out exceptions.

“I worry that reproductive rights advocates may be digging into untenable positions and failing to listen to those affected most by the current reality,” wrote one maternal-fetal medicine physician in Tennessee.

Here’s the current reality: most Americans want restrictions on abortion. In fact, when asked about restricting abortion to concrete time frames, most say they would restrict it to either the first trimester or to the typical “exceptions” (rape, incest, life of the mother). Polling to date has consistently shown this, even post-Dobbs.

But do pro-abortion advocates particularly care about “those affected most by the current reality,” as this physician sees it? It appears not.

Cohen notes at Vox that “these same groups’ strong defense of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) at the Supreme Court this year” where they “argued that EMTALA — which requires hospitals to provide ‘stabilizing treatment,’ including emergency abortion care — represents a crucial federal protection for women in medical crises,” don’t seem to support the idea of “codifying the Biden administration’s interpretation of EMTALA or similar protections through legislation.”

And then comes the kicker (emphasis added):

These tensions — between principle and pragmatism, between long-term strategy and immediate needs — have taken on new urgency as patients in the US encounter the limitations of state-level abortion exceptions….

But rather than pursue clearer federal standards around exceptions, advocacy groups are betting on abortion rights becoming more prominent as restrictions continue.

“Americans will continue waking up to stories of women who died preventable deaths because they were denied access to essential health care and voters will continue to see these bans wreak havoc on their families and communities,” declared a post-election strategy memo from Emily’s List, National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and Reproductive Freedom for All. “With anti-abortion politicians in power, abortion rights will only grow in salience for voters in elections to come.”

Working with Republicans on even limited protections could also undercut the narrative of GOP extremism — a message advocacy groups see as crucial for winning in 2026 and 2028.

Wait a minute. Is EMILY’s List saying what it looks like they’re saying?

Cohen wrote in a follow-up tweet, “Answer: There is a widespread opposition and suspicion to seeking compromise or harm reduction with Republicans. The big gamble strategy instead? Bank on more women dying and the abortion rights agenda growing more salient for voters in years to come” (emphasis added).

Or, as in the case of the stories thus far, “bank on being able to convince the public that more women are dying because of pro-life laws by presenting an extremely skewed and misleading picture.”

Do abortion advocates really hope to use women’s deaths to their advantage? Let’s take a look. image

Several X users cut to the chase.

“And this is why y’all keep lying about miscarriage treatment and fearmonger women & doctors into thinking it has been made illegal. More women dying helps the pro-abortion zealots. Simple as that,” wrote one.

Another said, “Wait, are you outright admitting to trying to get women killed unnecessarily so that you can use it as a talking point?”

“The masks keep slipping,” another wrote. “I actually welcome it. Please, keep doubling down on being insane. It worked great 2024, and will do wonders in 28 and beyond.”

Yet another pointed out, “It’s almost like they care more about fundraising than women or children.”

Another stated, “1.2 million [children aborted each year in the U.S.]. That’s what you want us to compromise on. Genocide.”

“‘More’ women dying?” wrote another X user. “What women have died? I saw the pro publica one and that article doesn’t say she died due to Dobbs. I haven’t seen one direct example. Which is shocking tbh.”

Another X user stated, “I get the problems involved in trusting GOP folks, but this seems uncomfortably close to ‘Don’t fix immigration because I want to campaign on it.'”

Yet another said, “Wow. This is straight up evil. They are saying that they would rather see women die than ‘undercut the narrative of GOP extremism.’ They want them to die for a narrative – for the ‘greater good’ in their minds, no doubt.”

It certainly does look that way.

The answer to all four questions listed above — 1) Are women really dying because of pro-life laws, or is the media simply trying to convince people that they are? Why? 2) ProPublica and other news outlets are only looking for and reporting stories of pregnancy-related deaths/injuries in pro-life states – why? 3) Leading medical organizations haven’t offered guidance regarding how to navigate pro-life laws – why? Are pro-abortion organizations actually waiting or hoping for more deaths and injuries? If so, why? — all have the same answer.

Because those aligned with this culture of death want abortion to be legal, without limits. Though their reasons why may vary — some claim it allows them “bodily autonomy,” some want it legal for racist reasons, some believe population control is the greatest good, and so on — they all ultimately believe that killing weaker humans is absolutely necessary for one reason or another.

And they don’t want to compromise with anyone who might stand in their way.

Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.

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