It is always painful to struggle with realities that conflict with your deepest beliefs.
A major theme of recent feminist writing has been the gap between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and the depressing experience of many women with casual sex. I have met many idealistic Jews, raised to always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, who were razed to the ground when they saw the occupation of Palestine up close. Many people believed that because the impetus behind pandemic school closures was noble, the results would not be devastating.
Perhaps some in the anti-abortion movement are currently struggling with an equally uneasy gap between intentions and effects. At least that’s the most sympathetic reading of prominent abortion opponents’ angry denial when faced with a predictable consequence of abortion bans: delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.
Since Roe v. Wade was overthrown last month, there has been a steady barrage of horror stories, including a number of women who refused abortions due to life-threatening pregnancy emergencies. Rakhi Dimino, a doctor in Texas, where most abortions have been illegal since last year, told PBS that more patients are coming to her with sepsis or bleeding “than I’ve ever seen before.”
Some enemies of abortion seem unencumbered by such suffering; Idaho’s Republican Party Recently rejected language of her party platform that would allow abortions when a pregnant woman’s life is at stake. Others, however, seem to struggle to reconcile their belief that abortion bans are good for women with these apparently not-good outcomes. The result is frantic and sometimes paranoid deflection.
In National Review, Alexandra DeSanctis, who has written for Times Opinion call for a constitutional change of fetal personality, suggested that pro-choice activists are the ones creating confusion about how abortion bans affect miscarriage treatment. “Abortion advocates are deliberately clouding the waters for the sole purpose of undermining pro-life laws,” she wrote. The influential anti-abortion strategist Richard M. Doerflinger accused are opponents of “reviving a public relations apparatus to spread false and exaggerated claims to ‘paralyze’ doctors and discredit the laws.” LifeNews.com tweeted that doctors are “willing to endanger women’s lives to create viral stories that make abortion bans seem culpable.”
To believe this, you have to believe that not only doctors, but also hospital lawyers and ethics committees work together to withhold care from afflicted women in order to generate political propaganda.
Recently NPR reported on the ordeal of Elizabeth Weller, a Houston woman whose water broke after 18 weeks. With very little amniotic fluid left, her fetus had almost no chance of survival. Continuing the pregnancy put Weller at risk of infection and bleeding. She decided to stop, but when her doctor arrived at the hospital to perform the procedure, she was not allowed to do so because of the abortion ban in Texas. The fetus still had a heartbeat and Weller showed no signs of serious medical problems. She waited days, getting sicker, until a hospital ethics committee decided she could be induced.
Weller’s story is simultaneously shocking and, for anyone who has followed the matter closely, predictable. Even before the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, there were cases of blatant mismanagement of miscarriage in Catholic hospitals, which operate under guidelines that prohibit abortion.
a 2008 article in The American Journal of Public Health detailed cases where “Catholic hospital ethics committees denied approval of uterine evacuation while fetal heart tones were still present, forcing doctors to delay care or transport miscarriage patients to non-Catholic facilities.” According to a report from a Michigan health official obtained by: the guard, a Catholic hospital subjected five women to dangerous delays in treating miscarriages for just 17 months. In 2013, one of the women, Tamesha meanssued the American Conference of Catholic Bishops, though her case was: turned down.
Given this history, it’s ironic to see DeSanctis use the example of Catholic hospitals to argue that abortion bans don’t hinder miscarriage care. For decades she wrote, “Catholic hospitals, which do not perform elective abortions, have somehow managed to treat pregnant women with ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages.”
One reason Catholic hospitals’ policies around abortion and miscarriage haven’t been more devastating is that, while Roe stood, other hospitals served as an outlet. In a 2016 ACLU ReportFor example, several doctors described caring for patients transferred from Catholic hospitals who would not treat their pregnancy-related emergencies. A doctor, David Eisenberg, recalled a patient who was transferred to his hospital from a Catholic institution 10 days after her water broke. Her sepsis was so severe that she suffered a cognitive injury. “To this day, I’ve never seen anyone so sick — because we would never wait that long to evacuate the uterus,” he said.
Abortion opponents write off reports of abortion bans that make miscarriage more dangerous because they distrust the people who publish them. Many wrote off the news of a 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to undergo an out-of-state abortion for the same reason. In a tweetDeSanctis called the uproar over miscarriage care an “insincere sideshow concocted by concerned trolls to undermine every pro-life law in the country.”
I will commit to wanting to undermine the anti-abortion laws; I believe they seriously endanger people’s health, but that’s by no means the only reason I’m against them. But dismissing an argument because of the motive of the person making it is a classic fallacy, something you resort to if you’d rather not get into the argument itself.
Members of the anti-abortion movement, including DeSanctis, often argue that abortion is never medically necessary. If they cannot bear to look clearly at the world they have made, it may be because they would have to admit that what they have said was never true.