The press made it seem that the state’s pro-life laws were to blame for a couple’s nightmarish experience after a miscarriage.
The press made it seem that the state’s pro-life laws were to blame for a couple’s nightmarish experience after a miscarriage.
T he press is at it again, badly misleading the public on one of the three key subjects where journalists absolutely refuse to set the record straight.
Those subjects, by the way, are firearms, faith, and abortion.
This past week, the media whipped up an abortion panic as part of their attack on Texas’s pro-life laws.
On June 4, the Dallas Morning News published a shocking exposé titled “How a couple found themselves tangled in Texas’ strict abortion laws after miscarriage.”
The story details a Texas couple’s harrowing ordeal when, after the wife’s miscarriage, they were unable to secure a timely surgical procedure for the removal of the deceased child. The story includes grim details regarding how, following the child’s death, the woman was twice prescribed misoprostol, “a drug that helps empty the uterus,” and how the doses, which increased in strength, did little to speed the process. Rather, the report claims, the pills “intensified” the woman’s bleeding and resulted in her passing “softball-sized blood clots,” all while she grew “increasingly weak and pale.” The story includes grisly details involving blood, vomiting, diarrhea, and passing out. The report also goes a long way to insinuate that Texas’s pro-life laws are the reason why the woman was given the runaround and prescribed pills instead of being given an emergency dilation and curettage.
Yet, interestingly enough, buried deep in the story, at the very bottom of nearly 1,700 words, is the following sentence: “It’s impossible to say whether the woman’s miscarriage care was influenced by the abortion bans, even though her case should fall outside the laws’ bounds.”
This seems like a detail that deserves a higher spot in the story. Also, how does one reconcile that buried tidbit with the story’s headline? And what, exactly, does Texas law say that would put the couple’s case “outside the laws’ bounds”? The Dallas Morning News report never explains.
Even more curious than burying this line at the end of the article is that it never once mentions that Surepoint, the clinic the couple relied on the most for their health-care needs, does not perform surgeries — “not for miscarriage, not for anything more than stitches,” the Dispatch’s John McCormack reports. Surepoint is not a hospital.
That detail would seem to deserve mention, let alone decent story placement. Now, to be clear, the couple did seek help from a second facility, an actual hospital. There, the doctors declined to perform an emergency dilation and curettage but offered to schedule one. This raises more questions about the doctors than it does Texas law.
Yet that angle does not interest the Dallas Morning News. It chose instead to focus exclusively on Texas pro-life laws, luring readers into believing the state’s laws forced the grieving couple to suffer unnecessarily. Other newsrooms have done likewise.
“Texas man details wife’s devastating miscarriage amid state’s strict abortion laws: ‘Nobody uses the word abortion,’” reported CBS News.
On social media, CBS hyped the story with the following blurb: “EXCLUSIVE: Texas radio host Ryan Hamilton shares his family’s harrowing experience with his wife’s miscarriage at nearly 13 weeks in a state with some of the strictest abortion laws in the U.S.”
Like the Dallas Morning News, CBS declined to mention that Surepoint is not a hospital and that it does not perform surgeries.
As is always the case with such “shocking” but flawed news cycles, the anti-Texas-law narrative took off like a rabbit on social media, with the usual suspects amplifying CBS’s and the Dallas paper’s carefully constructed version of events. Even failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got in on the act. A post on her X account shouted: “Another horrifying story of a woman being denied urgent medical care in Texas — thanks to abortion bans made possible by Donald Trump.”
Obviously missing from the discourse and news coverage is a clear explanation of how, exactly, Texas law is to blame for what happened to the couple. The Lone Star State’s laws absolutely contain provisions for dilation and curettage or medication for the treatment of miscarriage. The relevant legislation states clearly:
“Abortion” means the act of using or prescribing an instrument, a drug, a medicine, or any other substance, device, or means with the intent to cause the death of an unborn child of a woman known to be pregnant. The term does not include birth control devices or oral contraceptives. An act is not an abortion if the act is done with the intent to: (A) save the life or preserve the health of an unborn child; (B) remove a dead, unborn child whose death was caused by spontaneous abortion; or (C) remove an ectopic pregnancy.
Also, as McCormack notes, how would Texas’s pro-life laws scare doctors enough to decline a dilation and curettage for the woman but not enough to decline prescribing her misoprostol?
“Both acts would be illegal if intended to cause an elective abortion of a living unborn child; both acts are legal as [a] treatment for miscarriage,” he adds.
But who are we kidding? You know exactly why this cycle hasn’t included a more robust examination of what Texas state law actually states. It’s because there’s nothing to show that the laws influenced the couple’s experience. The Dallas Morning News report states this outright. If anything, the couple’s story says more about subpar medical standards and possibly worse than it does the Lone Star State’s pro-life legislation.
But why investigate shoddy medical practices when you can light up the internet with a story drawing the thinnest of threads between a couple’s personal loss, entailing a woman’s physical suffering, and a set of laws disliked by journalists? Not to mention while making the quiet admission that, in fact, there is no link between the loss and the law?
It’s pretty clear the vast majority of abortion reporting is inaccurate, flawed, and incomplete — not for any ignorance of journalists but for their willful dishonesty.