The following is reprinted from a Facebook post written by Live Action founder and president Lila Rose on October 19, 2020, in response to a viral Facebook post by Haylie Grammer, which can be read here.
A lot of you have sent this viral Facebook post to me and asked for my thoughts. Here they are:
1. This story is both heartbreaking and confusing. It is heartbreaking because it shares a mother’s loss of a precious baby girl, Embree. It is confusing because the author, Haylie Grammer, a grieving mother who says she didn’t want her child to die, uses her child’s story to justify abortion on demand. Haylie says she is “pro-choice.”
Tragically, Haylie is arguing that late-term abortion is fine and that abortion should be legal. This is extremely sad and wrong because abortion on demand kills thousands of babies a day. It is also misleading because the act of delivering Embree alive via c-section is NOT how most late-term abortions are done.
Part of the problem with this viral post is the mother is using it as an argument for why late-term abortion is good, and we do not have details about other options she may have been given, etc. So it is very hard to make a determination on whether or not what Haylie did was an abortion or not.
Haylie says that she did not want her child to die. IF appropriate steps were taken to try to save Embree’s life both inside and outside the womb, and Haylie’s life was in immediate risk, delivering Embree early does NOT constitute an abortion.
That’s an IF, because from what Haylie shared, we simply don’t know if there were other steps they could have taken to try to save baby Embree.
There are several points that Haylie makes which draw into question whether or not Embree’s early delivery was actually necessary. For example, Haylie said her doctor had to “apply for permission” to perform a c-section. If Haylie’s life was actually in jeopardy, her doctor would have been able to operate without that.
READ: Why miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and early delivery are not abortions
2. Doctors can – and should – try to save both mother and child. The tragic reality is that many doctors today ENCOURAGE abortion. That may be what happened in Haylie’s case, but it’s impossible to know based on what she shared.
I hear stories of doctors recommending abortion all the time. One personal example: When my sister-in-law was pregnant, she had her 20 week ultrasound and they discovered my nephew was missing one of his hands. The doctors suggested abortion MULTIPLE times. My sister-in-law and brother were deeply disturbed by the doctors recommending it. Of course, they delivered their son (my beautiful nephew!) and he is thriving today. The fact that my nephew is missing one of his hands does not make him any less valuable or worthy of life than you or me.
3. Abortion – the direct and intentional killing of a preborn child – is never medically necessary.
This isn’t my opinion. This is a fact. Thousands of ObGyns agree – the job of a doctor is to care for both mother and child, not kill one of them. Killing a baby isn’t a medical treatment. There are some very rare cases in which a child needs to be delivered early because the pregnancy has become life-threatening to the mother. But in those cases, every effort can be made to save the child. If the baby tragically dies despite those efforts, this is NOT an abortion.
Again, IF Haylie’s life was at risk (it is unclear from Haylie’s post that it was) and IF every reasonable effort was made to save Embree (unclear that’s what happened), delivering Embree early did NOT constitute an abortion.
Most late term abortions are done through “Induction” or “D&E” to kill living babies in the womb. Here are the technical descriptions (warning: graphic):
An induction abortion is committed on babies between 27 and 40 weeks old. At this stage, children are usually killed by a lethal injection of chemicals into the baby’s heart or body that causes the baby to suffer a heart attack. The doctor will then induce the mother, who will experience labor just as she would with a live child, but she will deliver her child dead. There are also documented cases of babies at this stage being delivered alive by abortionists and killed after birth.
A D&E, or dilation and evacuation abortion, is usually committed on babies in the second trimester of gestation. A D&E is a dismemberment abortion that begins with dilation of the woman’s cervix, which usually takes 1-2 days. The baby may be killed by a lethal injection, but is often still alive at the time he or she is dismembered. After the dilation process, the abortionist uses instruments to find and grasp onto the baby’s body parts and rip them off one by one. A living baby who experiences this torture will die from bleeding out. Once the baby’s arms, legs, and torso have been grasped and pulled off, the abortionist will find and crush the baby’s head and remove it from the birth canal.
In conclusion: stories like Haylie’s pull at our heartstrings, because we empathize with the terrible pain a parent goes through when losing their baby. We cannot allow tragic stories with incomplete information to be weaponized to justify killing preborn children, period.
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