As arguments surrounding exceptions to laws protecting preborn children from abortion continue to rage, all the way to the Supreme Court, abortion advocates have been claiming that pro-life laws are a drastic threat to women’s lives — and one op-ed claims this danger is engineered on purpose.
The extremely pro-abortion Ms. Magazine featured an article by Tess Graham in response to the case currently being heard by the Supreme Court regarding Idaho’s laws protecting preborn children from abortion. In Idaho vs. the United States, the Supreme Court is hearing a lawsuit from the Department of Justice (DOJ) claiming the state’s Defense of Life Act violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).
Dishonestly pointing to cases of negligence and malpractice
“Like many other abortion bans in the United States, the Idaho law contains a so-called life exception, which purports to allow an abortion when ‘necessary to prevent the death’ of the pregnant person,” Graham wrote. “But do these exceptions actually preserve the lives of patients in practice? As Mayron Hollis, Amanda Zurawski, the family of Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, and countless other women can attest, the answer is no. And the truth is, they’re not designed to.”
But in each of these cases Graham mentioned, the problem was one of medical negligence or malpractice — not an immediate need to intentionally kill one’s preborn child. But this makes no difference to abortion activists like Graham.
“No matter how they’re drafted and redrafted, abortion bans rest on the denial of the fundamental human right to reproductive autonomy,” she wrote. “So-called life exceptions are designed to make abortion bans seem more politically palatable by allegedly allowing for abortions in ‘extreme’ circumstances. But their political function is revealed by their unworkability: The exceptions are medically incoherent and designed in ways that are not possible to implement.”
Ultimately, Graham argued, the point of laws like the one in Idaho is to eliminate the number of abortions committed — even if it means countless women die.
A lack of legal abortion didn’t lead to women dying… even before Roe
Unfortunately for Graham’s claims, there is no indication that a lack of legal abortion has led to women dying by the thousands — as evidenced by data compiled before Roe v. Wade was ever decided.
Researcher Christopher Tietze has said the actual number of deaths from abortion — in 1945, decades before Roe v. Wade — was less than 1,000 annually, and had already been declining, largely due to the advent of antibiotics and better medical procedures. The Washington Post’s previous fact check on the issue cited both Tietze and former Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Steichen Calderone, who acknowledged that the mortality rate had been declining due to antibiotics, and that 90% of illegal abortions were being committed by trained physicians. A 1975 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine found that the total number of deaths from abortion “has been below 500 since 1958 and below 100 since 1971.”
The Washington Post further explained that “[t]he CDC began collecting data on abortion mortality in 1972, the year before Roe was decided. In 1972, the number of deaths in the United States from legal abortions was 24 and from illegal abortions 39, according to the CDC.”
“Abortion advocates’ goal: Spread confusion through lies”
Additionally, as OBGYN Ingrid Skop, the Vice President and Director of Medical Affairs for Charlotte Lozier Institute, explained, pro-life laws do not put women’s lives at risk.
“As a practicing OB-GYN, I care for both a mother and her unborn child, and in my 30 years of practice, I have never had to resort to an abortion to save a woman’s life. In fact, about 90% of my obstetric peers refuse to perform elective abortions,” she wrote, calling arguments like Graham’s an example of fearmongering to scare people into supporting abortion. She concluded:
Abortion advocates have one goal: to spread confusion through lies. They want to increase abortions on demand at any time in pregnancy, and they will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.
It’s crucial that Americans, especially women, start questioning the abortion advocates weaponizing that confusion for their own benefit, rather than the pro-life protections that very clearly protect pregnant women facing heartbreaking situations.
