Once again, the media is exploiting the tragic loss of a child’s life to promote abortion. This time, the Lexington Herald-Leader falsely described abortion as if it is standard medical care during pregnancy complications. The outlet claimed that the standard of care for the premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) is an induced abortion — the act of deliberately killing a preborn child — because of the lack of amniotic fluid.
First, a quick look at the Kentucky law, which states (emphases added):
No person may knowingly
1. Administer to, prescribe for, or sell to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, or other substance with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being; or
2. Use or employ any instrument or procedure upon a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being.
The keywords here are “specific intent.” This means that a doctor may not intentionally kill a preborn baby. It doesn’t mean that a preterm delivery or emergency C-section cannot be carried out in an emergency. But the Kentucky legislature also included the following verbiage in the law (emphasis added):
The following shall not be a violation of subsection (3) of this section:
(a) For a licensed physician to perform a medical procedure necessary in reasonable medical judgment to prevent the death or substantial risk of death due to a physical condition, or to prevent the serious, permanent impairment of a life-sustaining organ of a pregnant woman. However, the physician shall make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of the unborn human being in a manner consistent with reasonable medical practice; or
(b) Medical treatment provided to the mother by a licensed physician which results in the accidental or unintentional injury or death to the unborn human being.
This reassures doctors that they are free to use their “reasonable medical judgment” to protect the woman’s life or health and that any medical treatment provided to the pregnant mother to protect her will not be considered an induced abortion.
Doctors advised bed rest. She chose abortion.
The woman in the Lexington Herald-Leader article, Genevieve Postlethwait, shared that her water broke at just 17 weeks — four weeks before her baby girl would be able to have a chance at surviving. Babies born as young as 21 weeks have survived outside the womb when given proper medical care. Postlethwait and her husband went to the OB/GYN’s office where an ultrasound was carried out. Their daughter was still alive, but Postlethwait stated that she looked “squished” and that the ultrasound tech was “clearly rattled and didn’t know what to say.”
This is unsurprising given the situation. When the amniotic fluid is low, babies do get “squished” in the sense that there is less room for them to move and grow. The lack of fluid can also affect how they develop, because the lungs, kidneys, and GI tract all depend on amniotic fluid.
The article goes on to state that the baby “would not continue developing without that fluid” and that Postlethwait was at a “serious risk of severe infection.” It claimed the “pregnancy was no longer viable.” Similar cases prove these statements to be unfounded. While there are, of course, risks with PPROM, there is no guarantee of either a positive or negative outcome.
Tara Vigarino’s story begins very similarly to Postlethwait’s. Her water also broke at 17 weeks and she was also told that her baby didn’t have much of a chance. But rather than abort her baby, Vigarino went on bed rest and drank a lot of fluids to try to increase the amniotic fluid. Each week, she went to the OB/GYN to check on the baby. At 23 weeks, she was given steroid shots to help her baby’s lungs. She stayed on bed rest until 31 weeks, which is when doctors decided to deliver the baby. Baby Dominic did “amazingly well.”
“I just want to tell women that, if they’re ever in the same situation, there is hope,” Vigarino said. “You could go on to have a healthy baby.”
In fact, Postlethwait’s doctor gave her the same advice because labor had not yet started, and therefore, there was hope to continue the pregnancy. Her doctor offered to refer her to Vanderbilt in Tennessee where she could be admitted on bed rest and monitored with the plan of inducing early (just as Vigarino did).
Postlethwait, however, thought being induced “sounded terrible” and “did not want that to be my first experience giving birth.”
She texted a friend asking for advice on where to get an abortion, accusing her doctor of being “team Keep It Going No Matter What.” She appears to have thought that giving her daughter a fighting chance was “what’s best for us.”
“It became very unhelpful very quickly,” her husband Stephen Montgomery, said. “We were looking for medical advice about our options.”
Apparently, they were unaware that their doctor was providing them with exactly that — medical advice.
The lies
But the misleading claims didn’t stop there. The Lexington-Herald reported that “because of the OB-GYN’s own religious beliefs — and because of Kentucky’s restrictive abortion bans, the expectant couple later came to understand — their doctor would not surgically remove the fetus, and she could not recommend where Genevieve could go to get an abortion, even though it is widely considered the standard of care in this scenario.”
Postlethwait said, “Her plan of action was to send us home and drink lots of water.” Based on Tara Vigarino’s story alone, this was not a piece of advice based on religion. It was strictly medical. Regardless, the doctor was well within her rights to not actively kill Postlethwait’s baby.
As stated above, Kentucky’s pro-life law would not have prevented Postlethwait from receiving care and, in fact, she was informed of ways she could try to protect her preborn daughter’s life.
As for the ‘surgery’ to ‘remove the fetus,’ this is no simple surgery where the baby is gently removed and it is not the standard of care for PPROM.
At 17 weeks, this procedure would have been a D&E procedure — also known as a dismemberment abortion, because the abortionist uses a Sopher clamp to grasp the baby’s arms and legs and tears them off of her body. The final part of the procedures is to crush the skull. This was the procedure that “Genevieve wanted” and which her hospital “declined to” commit, according to the article, which also called a dismemberment abortion “less traumatic” than inducing labor and delivering a child intact. Watch former abortionist, Dr. Kathi Aultman, explain the procedure in the video below.
This procedure is not the standard of care for PPROM, as explained by the Cleveland Clinic, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The Cleveland Clinic states that there are two options: delivery or expectant management, as Tara Vigarino chose.
Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of AAPLOG, previously explained in a statement to Live Action News that the treatment for PPROM is to admit the woman for observation to monitor her for any signs of infection or bleeding — not induced abortion. “There are signs of developing intrauterine infection that any physician who is well-trained in obstetrics can identify long before sepsis develops,” she said. “This is why these patients are monitored very closely and often as inpatients, at least for a few days.”
This same guidance is recommended by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which states that the standard of care is watchful waiting and observation. In some cases, the membranes will re-seal and the amniotic fluid may stop leaking, and medication can be given to stop preterm labor and strengthen the baby’s lungs, as in Tara Vigarino’s case. If infection is present, antibiotics will be administered, and if there are signs of further complications then early delivery (induction of labor) would be called for — which is legal in every state.
Yet, less than a week after her water broke, the article reports, Postlethwait was “at a loss of options that felt safe from the Paducah hospital.” So against her doctor’s advice, she and her husband drove 70 miles to an Illinois abortion facility and paid $1,100 for her baby girl to be killed, likely through dismemberment.
What’s the wider problem?
The Lexington Herald-Leader went on to claim that lack of abortion in such a situation is a common issue in Kentucky and conflated induced abortion (intentional killing) with preterm delivery. It quoted Dr. Alecia Fields, an OB/GYN in Kentucky who is misleading readers and likely her patients about what is and isn’t an induced abortion.
“Abortion has become a dirty word, but it truly is something we deal with every single day, from miscarriage management, to ectopic pregnancies, to abnormal pregnancies, and unwanted or unplanned pregnancies,” she claimed. This is misleading. And it’s become such a common lie that one might suspect that pro-abortion doctors wish nearly every woman who has miscarried, delivered early, or had an ectopic pregnancy would believe that she has had an “abortion.”
Induced abortion is, indeed, “dirty” (it’s intentional killing, after all) and the problem is, the definition of “abortion” is being deliberately conflated with things like natural miscarriage. This is most likely an attempt to “normalize” the direct and intentional killing of preborn children through induced abortion by convincing women that pretty much everything is an “abortion” when, in fact, it isn’t. Pro-abortion ideologues know that if they can fool women into thinking they, too, have had “abortions” contrary to the actual facts, more of those deceived women will support the idea of “abortion” for other women, too. But it’s a clever bait-and-switch.
Miscarriage management is not an induced abortion because the baby has already tragically died. Surgery for ectopic pregnancies is not an induced abortion because the intent of the procedure is not to kill the baby but to save the mother’s life. (The baby dies as a secondary effect of the surgery.)
Killing a baby because of a disability isn’t “normal” as Fields claims. It’s a eugenic and discriminatory practice. And killing preborn babies because they have been deemed “unwanted” and “unplanned” is not health care — it’s strategic murder based on someone else’s perception of another human being’s value.
The doctors interviewed by the Lexington Herald-Leader, including Fields, said that the law confuses them, pointing to not only the lack of guidance provided to them by their hospital’s legal teams but also by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is supposed to advise doctors on such matters. But it also shows that these doctors are likely pro-abortion because they refuse to admit that there is a clear difference between actively killing a child in an induced abortion and carrying out a necessary delivery in an emergency.
After the dismemberment abortion, Postlethwait wrote a journal entry to her daughter, saying, “Letting you go (for now) is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. You are so wanted and will be always. Our first try at building you a little body, a little home, hasn’t gone like we ever hoped.”
Scientifically speaking, of course, this is nonsense. Her baby will not return to her in another body. She continued, “I want to give you lungs that breathe, muscles that move, a body that’s strong enough to bring you into this world and carry you through it.” This implies that Postlethwait didn’t want to give her daughter a chance at life, because she might have been born prematurely and she might have had medical issues as a result of the loss of amniotic fluid and preterm birth.
Exploiting her daughter’s tragic death by dismemberment in the name of legalized induced abortion for any reason at any time during pregnancy, when there was hope that she could live, is a shocking way to remember your child.
What this story illustrates is that media outlets and some doctors are attempting to promote intentionally killing preborn babies as the best option in any situation deemed to be outside of norm — as though it’s easier for them to not have to deal with a complicated pregnancy. It also shows that parents are living under the false notion that their “fetus” is nothing but a vessel, rather than their living child who, once killed, will somehow return to the next “vessel” they create.
Decades of pro-abortion propaganda, wrongful birth lawsuits, and misinformation about human development have led us here — a place where our own children are somehow unworthy of the time and effort it takes to protect and help them, and where doctors would rather abort children than work to save them and risk ‘disabled’ children being born into the world.
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
