The chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida is responding to Florida’s proposed protections for preborn humans at six weeks gestation with false claims designed to scare women.
In an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times, abortionist Robyn Schickler (who interestingly served as one of Facebook’s abortionist “fact checkers” in 2019 against Live Action president and founder Lila Rose’s statement that abortion — the intentional and direct killing of a human being before birth — is never truly medically necessary) claimed that legislation protecting preborn children from abortion beginning at six weeks when a heartbeat can commonly be detected (the human heart first begins to beat 21 days post -fertilization) will kill women.
The abortion industry has been frantically fighting against the Florida bill, even going so far as to compare preborn humans to Tic-Tacs, but Schickler’s claim is an old one… and one that has been frequently debunked.
Before the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion advocates warned that the end of Roe would cause women to die by the thousands, allegedly in the same manner that they did before Roe was determined in 1973. The problem is, women didn’t die by the thousands from illegal abortions before Roe. “The CDC began collecting data on abortion mortality in 1972, the year before Roe was decided,” the Washington Post previously explained. “In 1972, the number of deaths in the United States from legal abortions was 24 and from illegal abortions 39, according to the CDC.”
Another report, from the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine in 1975, found that the total number of deaths from abortion each year “has been below 500 since 1958 and below 100 since 1971.” In addition, researcher Christopher Tietze and former Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Steichen Calderone also have said that the number of women dying from abortions, legal or illegal, plummeted with the advent of penicillin and improved medical procedures, and that 90% of illegal abortions before Roe were committed by trained physicians.
Yet Schickler still attempted to scare women into believing that a law protecting preborn children will put their own lives at risk.
“Doctors are at the point where we have to say, ‘Yes, you will die if you don’t have an abortion. Yes, I am capable of providing an abortion. No, I am not allowed to provide that abortion because some politicians don’t like it, but here’s a state you can travel to instead,'” she wrote. “Or better yet, ‘Maybe I can do it, but I need to ask a lawyer before I’m allowed to save your life.’ Because that’s what a sick, scared patient will need in order to receive treatment — to wait for permission from a lawyer.”
Furthermore, she added, “[W]hat does a doctor do when their patient’s organs are failing? In Florida, nothing. If your patient is pregnant, all you can do is sit on your hands and wait until they get sicker.”
This is untrue, and it is insulting to the medical profession to insinuate that active and direct killing is the only option to “treat” a pregnant patient in need. “Sitting on your hands” because you cannot intentionally kill a child prior to birth sounds more like medical negligence than medical care. Most physicians aren’t in the habit of intentionally killing preborn children in the first place.
Every single state in the country has exceptions written into pro-life laws that allow for interventions to be taken if needed to save the mother’s life, and one would reasonably expect that every possible medical intervention would be made for a patient in need.
Schickler (along with numerous other media anecdotes) uses examples of real pregnancy complications that supposedly should have been treated by committing an induced abortion. Yet each of them — pre-eclampsia, hyperemesis gravidarum, cervical incompetence, and more — have legitimate medical interventions that can be taken.
An induced abortion — the intentional, targeted killing of a preborn child — is never the standard of care for such complications. The medical standard is to respond with surgical or medicinal interventions, and if those fail, to perform an emergency C-section or induction. The preborn child may be too premature to survive, but the intent of the procedure is not to cause the preborn child’s death. And these interventions are completely legal.
