Woman who never conceived a child falsely claims her D&Cs were abortions

Lora-Ellen McKinney claims in a recent Boston Globe op-ed that she had her first “abortion” at age 11 and “another five or six between the ages of 12 and 21” — yet McKinney also says she has never been pregnant. How can this be?

It’s simple. She’s wrong. McKinney is conflating the use of a D&C (dilation and curettage) as a medical treatment for other purposes with the deliberate act of killing a preborn human being through use of this procedure.

McKinney claims that “[t]he abortions were [her] treatment” for vascular-type Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (vEDS), a rare connective tissue disorder which is characterized by arterial rupture and uterine fragility, among other complications. She states, “In concert with hormone shots, uterine packing, and birth-control pills, my D&Cs were mostly used to remove tissue overgrowths from my uterus, control uterine polyps, and to diagnose a precancerous condition called endometrial intraepithelial hyperplasia, in which the lining of the uterus becomes overly thick.” These conditions can be associated with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

However, without a pregnancy, there can be no abortion. McKinney may have undergone many dilation and curettage (D&C) procedures, but she never had a single abortion. 

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On its Abortion Care page, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) states (emphases added): “Induced abortion ends a pregnancy with medication or a medical procedure.” If you hover your mouse over the words “Induced abortion” a pop-up definition appears: “An intervention to end a pregnancy so that it does not result in a live birth.” Rather more simply, the Cambridge Dictionary defines “abortion” as “the intentional ending of a pregnancy.” And the National Library of Medicine defines “abortion” as “a procedure to end a pregnancy.”

McKinney is doing what so many others, including many celebrities, have done: she is conflating a legitimate medical procedure to treat a medical condition with the act of induced abortion. But the fact is, these are not synonymous. A D&C is only an abortion when it is used to intentionally end the life of a preborn child. If the child has already died (as in a natural miscarriage), the procedure is not an abortion. And if, as in McKinney’s case, there is no child to begin with, it most definitely is not an abortion – according to any medically accepted definition. 

This is not the only point upon which McKinney is either wildly misguided or intentionally dishonest. “Were I a young girl in most of the United States today,” she claims, “… I [would not] be allowed the procedures required to keep my challenged uterus healthy. This is because my treatments as dictated by doctors have now been politicized and miscast as something they are not.”

This is patently false. No pro-life law prohibits D&Cs for reasons such as those which prompted McKinney to seek hers. 

Furthermore, this is an incredibly ironic statement on McKinney’s part, given that the one doing the “miscast[ing]” is McKinney herself, and those politicizing procedures like D&Cs are her own pro-abortion allies.

It is not pro-lifers who are conflating legitimate healthcare procedures with abortion – it’s abortion advocates. “Abortion is healthcare” is one of their pet slogans — a false mantra repeated as often as possible in order to convince the public that restricting abortion is tantamount to restricting medicine.

Don’t be duped.