Opinion | Who Decides When a Pregnancy Is Life-Threatening?


I think one of the things that has been most notable about the way the abortion debate has played out since Dobbs has been the focus on difficult pregnancies, pregnancies where the woman’s health is threatened in some way, where there’s an issue with the pregnancy, where there’s a potential miscarriage, and so on. You talked about essentially the idea that there isn’t really any other circumstance where a pregnancy should be treated as life-threatening to the mother, and aborted. That is a very, very unpopular position. Is there any room for effectively saying, look, if we are going to restrict abortion, we need to recognize that there has to be a certain kind of latitude for doctors in these circumstances? Well, first of all, it’s important to note that the exceptions, the rare cases for life-threatening emergencies, that they’re coded that way anyways, or rape or incest are less than 3 percent, maybe even less than 1 percent. So I think that’s also just important ground to set that this has always been used in the political context, and the media context, as this is why we need abortion. And then you get a million abortions a year —— Absolutely, absolutely. I’m just curious. Can the pro-life movement basically say, look, in those situations, we don’t know exactly which abortions count as saving the life of the mother or not, but we are willing to accept that doctors are going to make decisions that we’re not going to second-guess. So I think it is in the training of the doctor. When a doctor is committed to both lives and is not secretly, “I want to support abortion liberalization because that’s my agenda that I have,” I think it’s a lot easier for a doctor to operate. And it is very easy to politicize these cases. And that’s what has happened again and again and again. They’ve become politicized to say, well, in this case, this woman wasn’t given care because of the pro-life law, but you start to investigate — and we do this all the time at Life Action News, we work with medical professionals who provide their expert opinion. We can care for both. There’s ways to care for both. That really, I think, hasn’t really reached enough people that there’s —— But in the meantime, you have laws and you have hospitals that have not been trained in these practices or doctors who disagree with those arguments or who are in the position of basically saying, “We’re in states that ban abortion. There are a life of the mother exceptions. We’re not sure what those cover.” And then that yields stories of medical difficulty that I think some of them, some of them are blown out of proportion, but some of them are legitimate. And it seems like your argument would be in those circumstances, the hospitals are basically just doing the right thing by waiting. But that, again, seems to me —— But what I would also say is there’s no investigative energy behind all of the cases where abortions may have been performed and there were also bad outcomes for mom and baby. Certainly for the baby. The baby’s dead. There’s always the worst outcome for the baby, And there’s no energy behind that investigative reporting. I mean, maternal mortality rates in America are atrocious. They’re atrocious. And that’s not because of pro-life laws. That’s because of our health care system.

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