The misconception that induced abortion (the direct and intentional killing of a preborn child) is basic health care has spread through the U.S. like wildfire since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Tragic news stories manipulated to earn favor for the killing of preborn children have made it seem as though without it, women with pregnancy complications will be left to die. Some doctors appear to be on board with this, blaming pro-life laws when their own medical negligence leaves their patients suffering.
Pro-abortion writer Jessica Valenti has helped to spread these abortion misconceptions, and a recent admission from her shows how deeply these lies are affecting women.
Valenti has been writing her Abortion, Every Day newsletter since shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned, keeping readers updated on abortion news with a pro-abortion bias. Her new book, “Abortion Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win” comes out this month, and as reported by Mother Jones, Valenti is fighting for the right to kill preborn children for one main reason — her daughter, Layla.
“It was her I cried for the night the Dobbs decision was leaked,” Valenti wrote in her book. “I remember crawling into bed with my husband and sobbing. Wailing, really. I kept saying, ‘My daughter, my daughter.’ A mother’s job is to protect her children. How could I possibly do that now?”
So she began writing constantly about abortion. “[Layla] went from having a mom who is writing a weekly column and super-present to someone who’s just not,” she wrote. “It’s a mind f***, that’s for sure.”
Valenti is convinced that it is necessary to intentionally and directly kill preborn babies to protect women, and that someday her daughter might need to kill her own preborn child to save herself — whether for actual health reasons or simply because, as Elon Musk recently stated, “We terrify girls, [saying], ‘If you get pregnant, your life’s over.'”
Valenti has found herself pulled so deeply into pro-abortion mind games that she admits she is no longer present for her young teen daughter, who is seemingly witnessing her terrified, anxious mother focusing on access to abortion.
But is this fear founded in reality?
Misinformation about life-threatening pregnancy complications in pro-life states
Abortion advocates are quick to blame pro-life laws for medical negligence or tragic circumstances surrounding pregnancy complications, but such tragedies happen in ‘pro-choice’ states as well.
Google Reviews of abortion facilities in ‘pro-choice’ states detail stories of pregnant women being dismissed by staff when they arrived at abortion facilities and emergency rooms with medical complications. In a review of A Preferred Women’s Health Center of Charlotte in North Carolina, one woman wrote:
Went into here for a medication abortion. Everything went well until about 2 weeks after the procedure. I went back in for a foul smell and still bleeding a bit. I was dismissed quite a few times. […] I went and saw the doctor he told me I had bv [bacterial vaginosis]. After all of this I felt like they didn’t really care much about my problems I was having so I ended up going to the er.
When I went to the er they seemed extremely concerned . I was told that I have an extreme amount of blood and after another transvaginal ultrasound it was found out that I also have retained product hence why the smell. If I didn’t get a second opinion who knows what would have happened.
In addition, the Associated Press admitted in a recent report that neglect and failure to treat pregnant women don’t just occur in states with pro-life laws. In pro-abortion Washington, where abortion is protected, a hospital admitted that it routinely sends pregnant patients to other hospitals. And staff at an emergency room in pro-abortion California — a state that protects and celebrates abortion — failed to properly diagnose a woman with a uterine rupture, and the delay in care led to her baby’s death. Treatment for a uterine rupture, which is when the uterus tears, must be immediate — and standard care is an emergency C-section, not an induced abortion.
Misinformation surrounding the reality of abortion
An induced abortion — the only act that is prohibited by pro-life laws — involves using procedures with the goal of killing a human being in the womb. Pro-life activists aren’t in denial that sometimes pregnancies have to end in order to save the mother’s life, but a pregnancy can be ended without killing; preterm delivery and emergency C-sections are not abortions. Not even if the baby dies as a result of prematurity.
Abortion advocates historically and purposefully conflate abortion and standard health care in pregnancy emergencies. As Live Action News previously reported:
Induced abortion is not the standard of care or “appropriate medical care” for any medical emergency during pregnancy, and the procedures and treatments that are standard of care are not prohibited by pro-life laws. Abortion is not the standard of care for the preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM), preeclampsia, placenta accreta, placenta percreta, placenta increta, placenta previa, miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, cervical insufficiency, or infection. While some of these conditions may require an early delivery of the baby, or a procedure to remove a deceased baby, these are not the same as intentionally killing the preborn child.
Valenti, however, seems aware of the difference between abortion (killing by dismemberment or poison before delivery) and induced live delivery as she writes on Abortion, Every Day, “And remember, these [pro-life organizations] are the groups that are so intent on divorcing abortion from healthcare that they want to force women with life-threatening pregnancies into vaginal labor and c-sections, even before fetal viability.”
Abortion always results in a dead baby
It’s a wild claim that a woman would be forced to give birth to (or have trauma from giving birth to) her “wanted” baby, but not from living through a D&E, with forceps inside her body ripping the arms and legs off of that baby and crushing that baby’s skull. It’s also quite the assertion to claim that a woman may not have trauma from giving her “wanted” baby an injection of digoxin to send him into cardiac arrest and then give birth to a stillborn child, but would have trauma from skipping the poison and giving birth to him potentially alive, with the possibility of him receiving medical care.
Valenti acts as though abortion is a magic wand waved over a uterus to “poof” the baby away. If a pregnancy must end, the baby must come out of the uterus. That can be done through delivering the baby or directly killing and then delivering the baby. Either way the baby has to be born — it’s just a question of whether the baby will be dead or alive.
Yet Valenti has dedicated her life to convincing women that it is medically necessary to have their babies dismembered inside of them and tossed in a medical waste bin — thinking they had no choice and that it had to be done to save their own lives.
Imagine the trauma, the guilt, the what-ifs. And then to learn it wasn’t actually necessary must be heart wrenching and infuriating.
Despite all of this, just to cover all the bases, pro-life laws include exceptions for medical emergencies.
But that isn’t good enough for abortion advocates like Valenti.
They don’t just want abortion to be legal in cases in which they (falsely) claim it is medically necessary. They want it legal all the time for any reason through all 40 weeks of preborn life. And they’ll exploit tragic cases — and apparently even their own motherhood — to make sure that happens.
