One of the biggest battles the pro-life movement has to fight is the uphill battle against left-wing disinformation about restrictions on abortion. Leftist politicians and media figures intentionally mischaracterize any state law that restricts abortion as a threat to women everywhere.
Women aren't dying in back-alley abortions in red states, despite the breathless fearmongering of the left. Doctors aren't refusing care for women who miscarry in states with abortion restrictions, but that doesn't stop the left from making such claims.
Another part of the package of lies that the left relies on in the abortion debate is the safety of the abortion drug mifepristone. The pro-abortion crowd views this drug as a way for women to get around restrictions in red states, and leftists love to parrot the claim that mifepristone is as safe as over-the-counter drugs that people take all the time.
Because mifepristone is.
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) March 27, 2024
"Data from hundreds of studies and 23 years of approved use has shown that mifepristone is highly safe and effective, according to 12 of the country’s most respected medical associations...
Mifepristone’s safety is on par with those of common… https://t.co/4sc3ckU3nC
Several of these abortion lies have dovetailed in a report from the left-wing outlet ProPublica, which gives a false account of the story of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old woman who died in Georgia after taking the abortion pill regimen. ProPublica begins its lies right out of the gate in the third paragraph of its story (emphasis added):
[Thurman had] taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
The two statements in bold are patently false. An informative and thorough thread from the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs (AAPLOG) explains what really happened and how ProPublica twisted the truth.
ProPublica article claims that Georgia’s abortion law led to the tragic death of 28yo Amber Thurman. Her preventable death was related to abortion – but not as the title implies. Read this 🧵 on how physicians could have intervened to save her life…
— AAPLOG (@aaplog) September 17, 2024
The thread describes the timeline of Thurman's visit to the hospital. She had taken mifepristone in North Carolina before heading home to Georgia, where she took the second step in the abortion pill regimen. She went to the emergency room with a variety of symptoms, some of which are too graphic to describe here.
The AAPLOG suggests that negligence or incompetence on the part of hospital staff may have led to Thurman's death. Doctors didn't perform a D&C until nearly a day after she arrived at the hospital, and she died on the operating table.
"This complication of abortion drugs is not rare," AAPLOG explains. "Retained tissue requiring surgical evacuation occurs in roughly 5% of women who take these drugs at 9 weeks."
It adds:
Georgia’s law does NOT criminalize doing a D&C (nor does any other state law), especially when there is no detectable fetal heart rate (which there weren’t in this case).
GA’s law also allows for a D&C, even with a detectable heartbeat, to prevent the death or serious physical impairment of a pregnant woman. It prevents a D&C that has the sole intent of ending the life of a preborn human being.
"The reason Georgia’s abortion law is not responsible for Thurman’s death is simple, it explicitly allows physicians to intervene in cases of medical emergencies or if the fetus has no detectable heartbeat, both of which applied in Thurman’s case," AAPLOG's Dr. Christina Francis wrote in an op-ed at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Any assertion that she experienced a delay in the case as a secondary result of the law is speculation. One thing is clear, she died from a legal chemical abortion which abortion advocates have argued is safer than Tylenol."
Naturally, this hasn't stopped ProPublica and other left-wing outlets from repeating the claim that Georgia's law does not allow D&C procedures and thus led to Thurman's death. After all, who cares how much you have to lie when you're pushing a pro-abortion narrative?
Dr. Susan Bane, MD, PhD, board vice chair at AAPLOG and board-certified OB-GYN, gave the following statement to PJ Media:
Abortion advocates want to point to Amber Thurman and Candi Miller's [another woman whose death ProPublica attributes to Georgia's pro-life law] deaths as proof of the dangers of pro-life laws, but their case falls short on multiple levels. Most egregiously, they overlook the blatantly obvious common thread between these two tragic stories: both women died from legal abortion drugs, which these advocates have touted as "safer than Tylenol," combating pro-life efforts to raise awareness about these drugs' risks and fighting to knock down commonsense regulations on their dispensation and consumption. I hope that if nothing else, these stories serve as a wake-up call for abortion advocates to start being honest about these drugs and prioritize women's safety over their ideology.
This level of false reporting goes beyond irresponsible. Pro-lifers in Georgia and everywhere else must call out this type of agenda-driven, patently untrue media coverage when it occurs.
When I write about the pro-life cause, I often quote a song lyric that sticks with me: "The fight for life is always real." It's one of the many fights that conservatives are engaging in this year, and you can help us in these fights by becoming a PJ Media VIP.
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