Day 6

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" Abortion Arguments Series: Day 6 of 10

"The exceptions don't work in practice. Women are dying."

This is the one where you really need to be able to tell the truth from lies.

For example…

Amber Thurman was 28, a single mom in Georgia. In 2022 she found out she was pregnant with twins and decided to end the pregnancy. Georgia had just restricted abortion after six weeks, so she drove to North Carolina for a surgical abortion. She hit traffic and missed her appointment. The clinic gave her abortion pills instead and sent her home.

Days later she was vomiting blood. She'd retained tissue, a known complication of the pills. She went to a hospital in suburban Atlanta needing a routine D&C, to clear it. Doctors diagnosed severe sepsis. And then they waited. Twenty hours. Her organs began failing. When they finally operated, it was too late.

Obviously this was a tragedy and an outrage. But there's a second outrage, and it's what was done with her story.

Jen Psaki on MSNBC said Georgia "had made performing that procedure a felony, with few exceptions." So Amber "waited, and she waited, and she waited."

Tim Walz on Fox said "States like Georgia force women to cross the border, and then we have the death of Amber Thurman."

The Atlantic's headline: "The Women Killed by the Dobbs Decision."

Here is what every one of them left out. A D&C is not a felony in Georgia. It's not a felony anywhere in America.

Georgia's law defines abortion as an act intended to cause the death of an unborn child, and it specifically excludes removing a child who has already died. Nothing in that statute prohibited the procedure Amber needed. Nothing required the hospital to wait.

Twenty hours passed for reasons nobody has ever explained, and no doctor has ever said the law was one of them.

Don't take my word for it. Take her family's. Their attorney, Ben Crump, stood in front of cameras and said: "Even under Georgia law, the doctors had a duty to act to save Amber." The family sued the hospital. Not the state. Not the law. The hospital.

And when Tim Walz repeated the false narrative on Fox, the anchor corrected him on the air, with the family's own position.

So notice how the narrative was born. A woman had a complication from abortion pills. A hospital let her deteriorate for a day when the law allowed it to act. The law was not vague. Her family blames the hospital.

But the story that reached the public was that a pro-life law killed her.

Now, obviously I'm not saying every story is like this. Some aren't.

In Texas, women with ruptured membranes were told to wait until they were sick enough, because that law was written vaguely and carried prison time for doctors who guessed wrong. That's a real failure in the legislation. Vague standards in the law plus harsh penalties produce defensive medicine that hurts women.

Texas's own supreme court later clarified that the law never required a woman to be near death, and state lawmakers subsequently passed the 'Life of the Mother Act' to make that protection explicit in the statute.

So two things can be true at the same time.

A. No abortion law in America prohibits treating an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage, or a genuine emergency. Every one of them has an exception for the mother's life. If someone tells you otherwise, ask them to show you the text.

B. Also, some of those laws were written badly enough that doctors and hospital lawyers hesitated, and women were harmed. That's true too.

But look at the argument being built on top of it. "One law was vague, so all abortion restrictions must go."

If a fire code is written so confusingly that a building burns, nobody proposes abolishing fire codes. You rewrite the code. A poorly drafted exception is an argument for a well-drafted one. One that names the conditions, lets doctors act at diagnosis, and protects medical judgment.

But it has never been an argument for abortion on demand up until birth.

So when you hear the next story, and you will, ask two questions.

What did the law actually say? (Not the memes online. Not the media narratives. Go to the source and look at the actual legislation)

And what got left out between the hospital and the headline?

These women deserve better than vaguely written legislation. They deserve better than hospitals that substitute risk management for emergency medicine. And they certainly deserve better than to be dishonestly used as political talking points."