Last week, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cited my work, out of context, as an example of how pro-lifers don’t care about women’s health. In my response to her earlier this week, I pointed out that she used a single tweet of mine to assert that I don’t care whether women who suffer a miscarriage are able to obtain necessary medical care after the fact. Naturally, Goldberg ignored the vast majority of my recent work — including additional tweets, full-length articles, and even an entire book — all of which is extremely clear about how pro-life laws both should and do protect the lives of both pregnant mothers and their unborn children.
In her column this week, Goldberg cited me again, once more taking a single sentence of mine and using it as representative of my views, without citing any of the surrounding work that disproves her argument:
In National Review, Alexandra DeSanctis, who has written for Times Opinion calling for a fetal personhood amendment to the Constitution, suggested that pro-choice activists are the ones sowing confusion about how abortion bans affect miscarriage treatment. “Abortion supporters are muddying the waters on purpose, with the sole aim of undermining pro-life laws,” she wrote. The influential anti-abortion strategist Richard M. Doerflinger accused his opponents of “revving up a public relations apparatus to spread false and exaggerated claims in order to ‘paralyze’ physicians and discredit the laws.” LifeNews.com tweeted that doctors are “willing to put women’s lives at risk to create viral stories making abortion bans look culpable.”
Naturally, Goldberg ignored that both my article and Doerflinger’s contained thousands of words of essential context explaining why direct induced abortion — a procedure that intentionally kills the unborn child — is never medically necessary to protect the life or health of a pregnant mother. This is an indisputable fact. Pro-lifers have argued since the very start of the abortion debate that it is always morally acceptable, and should remain legal, to perform necessary health-care procedures in cases of medical emergency, even those that might result in the unintentional death of an unborn child, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy. It is abortion supporters who are attempting to create a lack of clarity about this, pretending that direct induced abortion is the same thing as a necessary health-care procedure that has the foreseen but unintended consequence of the unborn child’s death.
Elective, induced, direct abortion is just that — elective. Induced abortion takes place when a pregnant mother doesn’t want to be pregnant any longer and engages an abortionist to take the life of that child. By contrast, and as a new report from the Lozier Institute makes clear, in various types of medical emergencies when a mother’s life is at risk, doctors can almost always deliver the child safely (with the primary exception of an ectopic pregnancy, where the embryo has implanted outside the womb). Saving a mother’s life never requires direct killing of her child, even if a medically necessary early delivery might result in the child’s death, depending on how developed he or she is. This is why pro-life laws defer to a doctor’s medical judgment but also require choosing whatever procedure is most likely to result in both a healthy mother and a healthy child. In other words, directly and intentionally destroying the child is never required to save a mother’s life; there are two patients involved, and both lives should be considered worth saving.
But because abortion supporters by and large are refusing to defend their actual policy preference — elective abortion on demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy — they are reduced to patently false claims, such as that pro-life laws, no matter how they are written, will result in mothers dying grisly deaths. This is simply untrue, and Goldberg’s weak effort to portray pro-lifers as heartless does nothing to change that.