After the fall of Roe v. Wade, stories about the so-called necessity of abortion began flooding media outlets. Many pro-abortion activists claimed that women needed abortion, which was a form of “health care,” because abortion is the same thing as a treatment for miscarriage. Yet while some of the processes involved may be the same, there is a vast difference between abortion and miscarriage.
A tragic loss
Emily Savors, an outspoken abortion advocate, wrote an op-ed for the Columbus Dispatch about her miscarriage experience, which she likened to an abortion. “It was early 1997, and I was newly married with a 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. My husband and I wanted more children, and by late spring, I was pregnant. My first pregnancy being uneventful, we settled in for an easy few months with expectations of a baby due in March 1998,” she began. But tragically, she began spotting, and experienced a miscarriage, which she confirmed at her obstetrician’s office.
“Upon arriving, an ultrasound was conducted, and my worst fears were confirmed — there was no heartbeat,” she said (emphasis added).
Savors then claimed she underwent an abortion in order to save her life.
“The grief of this monumental loss still incredibly fresh, my doctor told me that if I didn’t undergo an abortion to remove the dead fetus, I risked developing a uterine infection that could jeopardize my life,” she said. “And so, for my own life and my family’s, I did what I never thought I would have to do – I ended the pregnancy.” (emphases added)
She concluded, “It was my decision to get an abortion to protect my life.” (emphasis added)
Let’s be clear: Savors did not have an induced abortion (killing a child who was still alive). Savors received post-miscarriage treatment (removing the remains of an already deceased child) to prevent infection.
Miscarriage or abortion?
There is no denying that Savors suffered an unspeakable tragedy. Miscarriage is something many women suffer, albeit often in silence. The situation can be even worse is when they, like Savors, need treatment to complete the miscarriage process. As the Mayo Clinic explained, this is sometimes necessary for a missed miscarriage, in which “the placental and embryonic tissues remain in the uterus, but the embryo has died or was never formed.”
Frequently, the procedure performed in this scenario is a dilation and curettage, or D&C. This procedure, while used by abortionists to commit surgical abortions in the first trimester, is also used to remove the remains of a child that has already died in miscarriage. And according to the Mayo Clinic, in addition to miscarriage treatment, a D&C can also be used to “diagnose and treat certain uterine conditions — such as heavy bleeding — or to clear the uterine lining after a miscarriage or abortion.”
Even Mayo Clinic differentiates between miscarriage and abortion. And in the video below, you can watch a former abortionist describe an early D&C abortion, done with the purpose of ending a child’s life.
TLC reality alum Jessa Seewald recently had a missed miscarriage, for which she had to undergo a D&C, and many rushed to accuse her of having an abortion, as Seewald is openly pro-life. Yet as Seewald pointed out, her child was already dead when the D&C was performed.
“There’s a world of difference between someone dying and someone being killed. To equate one to the other — and to a mother grieving the loss of her baby no less — is severely distasteful,” she said at the time. “There is a world of difference between a mortician and a murderer. Even a child understands the difference between the two.”
Even Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, acknowledged that abortion is not the same thing as treatment for complications like ectopic pregnancy, before scrubbing it from their website.
Meanwhile, treatment for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy remain legal in every single state — even those with laws protecting preborn children from abortion. Abortion does not need to be legal for women to receive miscarriage treatment; there is a world of difference between removing the body of a deceased preborn child, and actively, intentionally, taking that child’s life. It is dishonest, not to mention offensive, to conflate the two.
