Will abortion supporters ever come to terms with the fact that they’re the only ones who think abortion is synonymous with “medical care”? Apparently not, since Nicole Knight Shine at Rewire (formerly RH Reality Check) has what seems like the millionth “scoop” on the “scandal” of pro-life religious health providers declining to promote abortion.
MomDoc is Mormon-owned and the largest OB/GYN network in Arizona. You might think it obvious that an organization affiliated with a church that believes elective abortion to be “contrary to the will and the commandments of God” and makes participating in abortion grounds for loss of membership would not be the place to look for an abortion, but at Rewire, apparently you need to have your reporters call MomDoc and ask for abortions to figure it out.
MomDoc imposes a virtual gag order on employees when it comes to abortion care, as a half-dozen former OB-GYNs, nurse practitioners, and support staff told Rewire in a series of recent interviews by phone and email. What they described affords a window into the workings of a private medical practice, one that opposes abortion care and attempts to suppress abortion access on religious grounds.
Once again, we see that pro-aborts have no idea what “access” means. None of MomDoc’s activities described by Rewire in any way stop anyone from getting an abortion from a willing provider anywhere else in Arizona. It’s like saying I’m denying people “transportation access” by locking my car.
Ethical guidelines from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a professional organization of 57,000 members, advise physicians who object to abortion on religious grounds to notify patients beforehand and to refer them to abortion providers.
But according to Rewire’s own calls, MomDoc was perfectly upfront about not doing abortions as soon as callers asked about them. They’re supposed to notify callers they oppose abortion before they call how, exactly?
“You need to give your patients all the options so they can make their own choice,” Julie Kwatra, legislative chair of the Arizona chapter of ACOG, told Rewire in a phone interview. “Not telling a patient information is in opposition to every rule of medicine.”
Which would be a great point… if abortion itself wasn’t “in opposition to every rule of medicine”:
- Abortion violates the Hippocratic Oath’s calls to “tread with care in matters of life and death,” to face the possibility of taking life “with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty,” to “above all” avoid “play[ing] at God,” and to heed a “special obligations to all my fellow human beings” (emphasis added).
- Most abortions are sought for reasons completely unrelated to health or medicine.
- Abortionists admit that hospitals tend to dislike abortionists and real physicians look at them like “the lowest of the low,” and abortion is shunned in medical school as fewer and fewer doctors choose to learn how to perform one.
- Just 0.2% of doctors provide abortions. According to one survey, only 14% of obstetricians have ever provided abortions. Abortion stigma within the medical community has been observed even in numerous western countries considered more pro-abortion than the United States.
These protections, critics argue, further stigmatize a legal medical procedure that’s already under attack in GOP-held legislatures nationwide.
“Legal medical procedure!” There’s that magical chant to end reflection on abortion again!
MomDoc’s website and advertisements make no mention of its faith-based opposition to abortion rights, pro-choice advocates note.
“Drive down the freeway and every other billboard will be a MomDoc billboard on how they provide midwife care and how they really care about the family,” Kat Sabine, executive director of NARAL Arizona, said in a phone interview with Rewire. “To me it’s almost like locking down and cordoning off abortion care even more than it is in the community.”
Personally, I’d say the website probably should have a disclaimer. But it’s not MomDoc’s fault if the abortion-obsessed project their own biases onto messages about real care that don’t suggest abortion. In particular, it’s a hoot that Sabine and Shine cite a billboard about family, as if the word should somehow include a procedure that’s all about eliminating the newest member of someone’s family.
“I worked in the medical field for 35 years, and I have never been told I can’t discuss a procedure,” the former scheduler said.
Gee, think that might have something to do with the fact that there aren’t any other “procedures” that entail killing one person to “treat” another?
Pro-aborts so incessantly push this narrative that abortion is “intruding on medicine” because the premise, that real medicine requires patients to know as much about their options as possible and doctors to have as much latitude as possible to assess the cases before them as they see fit, is valid (even if pro-aborts don’t hesitate to micromanage medicine in areas other than abortion). But the application, grafting abortion onto the principle as if it’s just another medical procedure, couldn’t be more disingenuous.
