TLC reality alum Jessa Duggar Seewald recently experienced a heartbreaking miscarriage, the news of which she shared on social media. Yet it took no time at all for pro-abortion media to exploit her tragedy by calling it what it was not: an abortion.
Seewald shared a video about her miscarriage on YouTube, expressing her heartbreak after the loss of her fifth child. After she began bleeding, she visited the doctor, who told her the outcome didn’t look good. “Nothing could have prepared me for the weight of those words in that moment,” she said in the video. “At that moment I was just in complete shock. I didn’t have words. I just immediately started crying.”
Because she had health risks preventing her from passing the body of her preborn child at home, she had to have a post-miscarriage dilation and curettage, or D&C. “I was able to thank God in that moment for giving us this life, even if we wouldn’t be able to hold this baby in our arms,” she said, adding, “Those 10 to 15 minutes before I was taken back to the room where Ben and my mom were waiting were probably some of the hardest in my life, just laying there feeling so alone.”
She also described how difficult the procedure was, explaining the sadness of “waking up after the procedure was over and having this hollow feeling inside because you know that the life that was in you is no longer there, and you never did get to see your baby and say those goodbyes.”
Yet almost immediately after her announcement, pro-abortion media outlets began exploiting her miscarriage. Parade magazine ran a headline saying Seewald had a “life-saving abortion,” while the Arkansas Times published a blistering op-ed labeling Seewald a hypocrite.
Jezebel likewise claimed Seewald had an abortion, saying she didn’t actually have a miscarriage.
“People magazine and other outlets accepted Duggar’s framing of the experience as a ‘miscarriage’ — which would be fine, except that an anti-abortion celebrity literally having an abortion is probably something that’s worth discussing honestly,” Caitlin Cruz wrote for Jezebel. “It’s commendable that Duggar Seewald is sharing her experience of a procedural abortion. She rose to fame — along with her family — on the backs of reality shows promoting evangelical Christianity and its politics. Duggar Seewald’s story is proof that abortion treatment is needed and wanted by even the most anti-abortion among us.”
Pro-abortion writer Josie Duffy-Rice also tweeted, “To be clear this is a member of one of the most famous vocally anti-abortion families……admitting she got an abortion. people in my mentions telling me she had a miscarriage not an abortion are proving our point. a d&c is the technical term for the abortion procedure. she experienced a tragedy and needed medical intervention. one of the many reasons abortion should be legal.”
In actuality, a D&C is a dilation and curettage, which is utilized for many reasons — only one of which is to intentionally end the life of a child in the womb. The procedure, according to Mayo Clinic, is used to “diagnose and treat certain uterine conditions — such as heavy bleeding — or to clear the uterine lining after a miscarriage or abortion.”
Notice how Mayo Clinic differentiates between miscarriage and abortion.
Seewald seemingly responded to the miscarriage-abortion comparisons in a pinned comment left on her YouTube page (emphasis added):
Women have D&C’s for many reasons, not all of which involve killing a living human being. The ultrasound revealed that I had a missed miscarriage. My baby’s heart had stopped beating 3 weeks before I had a D&C. (Btw, this was not my first D&C— it was my second. My first was 2 weeks postpartum Ivy’s birth for retained placenta.)
Each person is created “in the image of God” (Gen 1:27), and to purposefully destroy a baby in the womb is an affront to the God who created that life.
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. There is a world of difference between a mortician and a murderer. Even a child understands the difference between the two.
A “missed miscarriage,” according to Mayo Clinic, is when “the placental and embryonic tissues remain in the uterus, but the embryo has died or was never formed.”
Live Action founder and president Lila Rose also responded to the pro-abortion claims equating Seewald’s post-miscarriage D&C to an abortion, tweeting, “This is at best ignorance, at worst a cruel lie. Jessa miscarried. Her baby passed away & she needed a surgery to remove her little one’s body. An abortion intentionally kills a living baby. Abortion is an intentional act of homicide, a miscarriage is a tragic natural death.”
This is at best ignorance, at worst a cruel lie.
Jessa miscarried. Her baby passed away & she needed a surgery to remove her little one's body. An abortion intentionally kills a living baby. Abortion is an intentional act of homicide, a miscarriage is a tragic natural death. https://t.co/Ik19G2SPI1
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) February 26, 2023
Rose further tweeted, “There’s a terrible, vengeful cruelty in insisting to a woman who has tragically miscarried her beloved baby that she had an elective abortion,” adding, “Burying a dead person ok. Burying a living person not ok. Same procedure, entirely different act. The significant difference is the killing part. Stop conflating miscarriage with elective abortion.”
Rose’s Twitter thread was filled with comments by abortion advocates dishonestly calling a D&C a “procedural abortion,” equating the natural death of miscarriage to the intentional killing of an induced abortion.
But in her YouTube video posted above, Seewald said at that moment when the ultrasound technician told them that the sac looked good but the baby did not, the technician gave Seewald and her husband some time alone in the room to grieve the death of their baby. “I was just in complete shock. I didn’t even have words. I just immediately started crying… just trying to process through the loss… and wondering, ‘what do we do from here?'”
“I had minimal spotting for, like, 24 hours and that was it,” Seewald said, noting that the miscarriage was a complete shock to them because she had stopped spotting and had no other signs of miscarriage.
Seewald said she ended up having to see her doctor “because [of] my history of hemorrhaging and all of that, there was concern that if I tried to just take something or pass the baby at home that I might have trouble and have to be transported… and so we decided to go to the hospital and get checked in there and go through a D&C.” What Seewald is saying lines up with Mayo Clinic’s information on miscarriage, which states that miscarriage can be managed in different ways — through “expectant management,” which means waiting for the baby’s remains to pass on their own; through “medical treatment,” which means taking a drug to cause the uterus to expel the remains; or through “surgical treatment,” which involves using the D&C procedure to remove the child’s remains.
It appears the surgical option was chosen because of Seewald’s history of problems with hemorrhaging, which could become dangerous. It is clear that the Seewalds’ baby was deceased before she underwent a D&C, and had died during a missed miscarriage.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, abortion advocates have increasingly attempted to liken treatment for miscarriage to abortion, even though natural/accidental death and intentional killing are in no way the same. Even Planned Parenthood previously acknowledged this, pointing out that treatment for ectopic pregnancy is not the same thing as an abortion — a fact the nation’s largest abortion business later removed from its website. And while the abortion industry often attempts to conflate miscarriage treatment and abortion, it’s a comparison that even pro-abortion women find distasteful and offensive.
And though many have used Seewald’s tragedy as a means to disparage her as a hypocrite, treatment for ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage (which are not induced abortions) are legal in every single state.
