The Atlantic has published an inaccurate pro-abortion article aimed directly at vulnerable women and compassionate Americans. The purpose is to fearmonger them into supporting abortion and convince them women are being denied legitimate health care because of pro-life laws.
At the center of the article, helping to fuel the lies and misconceptions surrounding what is and isn’t an abortion, are OB/GYNs who — instead of calming women’s fears with the truth — are prodding those fears with lies.
Is caring for both mother and child really so difficult?
“Kylie Cooper,” writes Sarah Zhang for The Atlantic, “has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby.”
Cooper has been willingly tasked with and paid to care for both mother and baby. Yet Cooper — who is also vice chair for the Idaho section of the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — wants us to believe that sometimes she has to actively and deliberately kill one of her patients to save the other.
Cooper “felt a growing sense of dread” when in June 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. A pro-life “trigger law” in Idaho, where she lived and worked, stood ready to protect preborn children in the state from abortion.
To be clear on what is and isn’t an abortion legally speaking: An induced abortion is an act that carries the goal of ensuring the baby dies. The only acts prohibited by pro-life laws are those that are carried out to directly and intentionally kill preborn children. For example: A D&C to remove a deceased baby and pregnancy tissue after an incomplete miscarriage = legal; a D&C to kill and then remove a baby from the uterus = prohibited.
OB/GYNs who are members of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), care for mothers and preborn babies just like Cooper does except they have never had to commit an induced abortion to save a woman’s life because they deliver the baby when necessary — they don’t kill him or her first.
Read more on that here.
Intentionally killing a baby while a woman is in active labor
The Atlantic included stories that appear to show how vital induced abortion is to women’s health. However, induced abortion is not the standard of care for any of these situations.
“In Texas,” wrote Zhang, “a woman whose water broke at 18 weeks—far too early for her baby to survive outside the womb—was unable to get an abortion until she became septic. She spent three days in the ICU, and one of her fallopian tubes permanently closed from scarring. In Tennessee, a woman lost four pints of blood delivering her dead fetus in a hospital’s holding area. In Oklahoma, a bleeding woman with a nonviable pregnancy was turned away from three separate hospitals. One said she could wait in the parking lot until her condition became life-threatening.”
Live Action News has previously debunked both the Texas story and the Oklahoma story.
The Tennessee story comes from an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by Dr. Nikki Zite in March, who said she had recently treated a woman who was suffering from preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) and was in labor. The woman didn’t want to deliver a baby too young to survive, said Zite, and, therefore, asked for an abortion. Zite incorrectly claimed in the brief that “abortion is the standard of care in her circumstance [PPROM] because she was at major risk of infection….”
But the woman was in active labor. Claiming that “abortion is the standard of care” for this situation is deliberately confusing. Premature delivery in such an emergency is not an induced abortion and is not prohibited by any law even if the baby dies as a result of being born too young.
But the patient didn’t want to deliver a baby that young, which means Zite should have tried to stop labor — not kill the baby mid-labor.
Risking pregnancy for a healthy baby, but not for one with a diagnosis
The Atlantic goes on to mention a patient of Cooper’s who was pregnant with her second child. During her first pregnancy, Kayla Smith was diagnosed with preeclampsia at 19 weeks. The standard of care is expectant management, and she made it to 33 weeks (another 14 weeks) before induced delivery — not induced abortion — became necessary.
However, during the second pregnancy, Smith learned her preborn baby boy may have Down syndrome, and the left half of his heart was “barely formed,” according to The Atlantic. A pediatric cardiologist said it was too severe to fix with surgery. If she were to develop preeclampsia again, Smith wanted an abortion. She worried that her son might suffer, despite the existence of palliative care to prevent suffering; she also worried she might die, despite doctors’ ability to care for her during her first pregnancy. But then something changed her mind.
The Atlantic reported, “Smith decided that getting an abortion as soon as possible, before her health was imperiled, would be best, even if that meant traveling to another state. She knew she wanted her abortion to be an early induction of labor—rather than a dilation and evacuation that removed the fetus with medical instruments—because she wanted to hold her son, to say goodbye. She found a hospital in Seattle that could perform an induction abortion and drove with her husband almost eight hours to get there. Unsure how much their insurance would cover, they took out a $16,000 personal loan.”
She did not need an induced abortion, and her decision to have one raises concern that she only chose abortion because of her son’s diagnosis. If her son had been “healthy,” would she have continued the pregnancy, despite the risk?
“Just in case they needed” to murder the baby first?
Cooper further explained that after Roe fell, every phone call made her anxious. She would wonder, “Would this call be the call? The one in which a woman would die on her watch? She began telling patients at risk for certain complications to consider staying with family outside Idaho, if they could, for part of their pregnancy — just in case they needed an emergency abortion.”
At any moment under Roe, Cooper could have had a patient at risk of dying and would have to find a way to save her — often by delivering the baby. The only difference after Roe is that she can’t intentionally kill the baby first.
The Atlantic then made it appear that Cooper is one of the vast majority “of providers who care for pregnant women in states with restrictive laws [who] reported feelings of moral distress…”
However, one of the studies The Atlantic mentioned included just 54 OB/GYNs who were asked about “situations in which they or their colleagues could not follow clinical standards due to legal constraints.” Some of those OBs could have been referring to their colleagues — and it is unclear whose “clinical standards” the survey was referencing and what those standards are. It also did not define “provider.” One of the other studies cited by The Atlantic surveyed 310 clinicians — all of them abortionists. Researchers admitted, “This study has limitations. Our survey carried the risk of selection bias, as clinicians responding to our survey may have been more likely to have experienced moral distress compared with those not participating.”
Selective compassion and ‘moral disgust’
The Atlantic then attempted to pull Christians into the mix by claiming that Sara Thomson, described as Catholic and pro-life, will commit abortions for medical reasons. “I had never considered myself a quote-unquote abortion provider, ” Thomson said. That is, until “certain kinds of care… became illegal under Idaho’s ban,” added Zhang.
Zhang continued, “She told me about women who showed up at her hospital after their water had broken too early—well before the line of viability, around 22 weeks. Before then, a baby has no chance of survival outside the womb. This condition is known as pre-viable PPROM…” She added, “Previable PPROM is the complication that most troubles doctors practicing under strict abortion bans. … The condition is not life-threatening right away, doctors told me, but they offered very different interpretations of when it becomes so—anywhere from the first signs of infection all the way to sepsis.”
Babies born as early as 21 weeks have survived and induced abortion has never been the standard of care for PPROM. In those cases, the women are carefully monitored until delivery has to happen. If the baby is too young to survive, that doesn’t mean the woman had an abortion; it means she gave birth prematurely. As previously reported by Live Action News:
… induced abortion is not the standard of care for pregnancy emergencies. Not PPROM, not preeclampsia, not placenta accreta, not placenta percreta, not placenta increta, not placenta previa, and so on (see more information at links provided). While some of these conditions may warrant early delivery of the baby, this is not remotely the same as intentionally killing the preborn child. Nowhere is induced abortion listed as a treatment for any of these conditions.
The fact that so many doctors don’t seem to understand the difference between premature labor and induced abortion (with the intent to kill the baby) is horrifying.
Additional research shows there is a complete lack of understanding among pro-abortion doctors and patients about what is and isn’t an abortion — and it appears that in some cases, rather than reading and understanding a state’s pro-life law, doctors are making potentially deadly assumptions.
Zhang continued, “Previously at her Catholic hospital, [Thomson] would have offered to do what was best for the mother’s health: terminate the pregnancy before she became infected, so she could go home to recover. Now she told patients that they had no choice but to wait until they went into labor or became infected, or until the fetus’s heart stopped beating, slowly deprived of oxygen from its compressed umbilical cord, sometimes over the course of several days. Thomson did not know that a fetus could take so long to die this way—she was used to intervening much sooner. She found forcing her patients to wait like this ‘morally disgusting.'”
Thomson is stating that rather than monitoring the mother closely, giving the baby steroids, and giving the woman’s wanted baby a fighting chance, she allegedly jumps straight to an abortion, which in the second trimester is a dismemberment D&E procedure.
Zhang then tries to show compassion for the child who will be dismembered or injected with a drug to induce cardiac arrest by lamenting that the baby might die slowly in the womb if he isn’t dismembered first. Dismemberment is arguably more “morally disgusting” than a baby dying naturally, but both are “morally disgusting” because a doctor charged with caring for that preborn baby has written her life off as meaningless and the mother’s pain of child loss as unsubstantial.
Other pro-abortion OBs in the story left now-pro-life states because of this perceived conflict and abandoned their patients for abortion-friendly states.
Remember the $16,000 Smith traveled with to pay for her late-term abortion? Guess pro-abortion doctors needed to follow the money.
