Medically Necessary Abortion, and Other Missed Conceptions

The arguments put forward by pro-abortion advocates have morphed substantially over my lifetime. I remember hearing “safe, legal, and rare” when I was growing up and thinking that the phrase sure sounded reasonable. In contrast, during the 2024 election season, I was fed a steady stream of political ads featuring an emergency care nurse who incorrectly asserted that pro-life candidates deny women the medical care they need. Inherent in this line of thinking is the implication that abortion can be medically necessary.

If true, this argument is quite persuasive. If false, it is a misleading smokescreen that harms adult women and women in the womb. To decide, we must define the word abortion. Normally, we would not have to, as most of us intuitively understand what abortion entails. Unfortunately, medical professionals and activists have started conflating miscarriage and abortion in an attempt to muddy our emotions and the political waters on the subject.

Miscarriage is the natural, spontaneous cessation of a pregnancy resulting in the death of a child. Abortion is the unnatural, elective, premeditated cessation of a pregnancy resulting in the death of a child. The fact that miscarriage and abortion both result in the death of a baby and may involve the use of similar medications, surgical procedures, and medical coding leads to many misconceptions. So a good mental shorthand works like this: abortion kills a live, healthy baby, through the use of suction, dismemberment, or chemicals.

Now, we have to ask ourselves when someone would elect to schedule a “medically necessary abortion.” Perhaps the mother is pregnant with twins and either she or her doctor wishes to cull the herd. Maybe her child is likely to be mentally or physically disabled in some way. The baby could have more severe abnormalities such as anencephaly, a rare disorder that almost guarantees the child will not survive long outside of the womb. Lastly, the mother’s health could be at risk, as she could have a heart defect, cancer, or another life-threatening malady that may be exacerbated by pregnancy.

In all of these cases, an abortion is never necessary and is certainly not a treatment. In this country, we are privileged to have specialized doctors who are trained to ensure the health of pregnant mothers and their babies week by week. Maternal Fetal Medicine doctors know how to determine exactly when it is safe for a mother to deliver. Delivering early by necessity, say if the mother or child’s life is at risk, is worlds different than abortion, which deliberately seeks the death of the baby as a matter of course.

Let’s take a difficult case, such as the case of ectopic pregnancy. In an ectopic pregnancy, an unhealthy embryo remains lodged in the Fallopian tube instead of traveling to the uterus where it belongs. This baby will not be able to thrive in the tube and must be delivered before its growth kills itself and its mother. However, removing the Fallopian tube containing the embryo is not abortion, as it does not dismember a baby or directly kill it.

I’m hoping that one day our technology will be advanced enough so that we can take an ectopic embryo, safely remove it from a Fallopian tube, and transfer it to the uterus where it belongs. Unfortunately, our technology is not there yet, not least because plentiful abortion access has likely stagnated progress on that front. In a culture that does not believe life starts at conception, why would anyone attempt to reverse an early miscarriage, especially if it’s “just a clump of cells?”

The “clump of cells” in question

In contrast, pro-life doctors believe that we should give pre-viable babies a shot at life in cases where early delivery is needed. While many women are told by fear-mongering physicians that they will die if they continue with a high-risk pregnancy, this is not always the case. A mother can stay at the hospital on bedrest for weeks or months after a premature rupture of her amniotic sac to give her baby a few crucial weeks to develop its lungs, for example. If a baby is anencephalic, a C-section delivery may be what is called for.

I am not going to sit here and minimize the danger that really can arise, such as if a woman develops an infection that threatens both herself and her child. In these cases, immediate delivery may be the answer. But induction is not abortion. Abortion is the violent killing of a child who is happy and healthy in their mother’s womb. Delivering a child who will die in the womb if he or she remains there one minute longer is giving the child his new best chance of survival. In other words, just because we do not have the tools to keep all babies alive at every gestational age does not mean his or her dismembering is the one-size-fits-all solution.

Imagine how our medicine, technology, and treatments would have developed by now if we had had a culture that did everything it could to save pre-viable children. “Good care” would no longer involve immediately delivering a baby and letting it die or the pulling apart of a child piece by piece. Instead, we could allow children to spend their last moments attached to the only person who can help them breathe on their own — i.e. their mother — instead of alone, shivering in a side closet.

Is this painful? Yes! Losing a child to a birth defect, stillbirth, or frankly at all is earth-shattering. So are long hospital stays and health risks the mother may face. “You would really put women through weeks of pregnancy knowing their baby will die?” the activist asks. I ask the activist this in response: Is abortion really the peaceful, loving, and honorable way to say goodbye to your child? I think not. And many other women who did not reject their maternal duties and instead chose life, even if they had only had five minutes to love their child outside of the womb, think the same.

Let’s Remember Why We’re Here

For those who are fighting for life, their pro-abortion interlocutors are quite keen on getting them to dive down rabbit holes. They want them on the rhetorical back foot, and this is why they continually bring up exceptional cases: rape, incest, medical emergencies and birth defects. As we know, the vast majority of abortions involve none of these exceptions and are instead predicated on securing one's lifestyle and acceptance by peers and relatives. In fact, a former abortionist recently stated that throughout his entire career of 1,200 abortions, only one was sought due to rape, two were for incest, and only around ten were related to genetic defects.

With the exceptions aside, we must ask the fundamental question: Are babies human, and if so, should they have rights? Abortion advocates answer no to both questions, but they will not reveal this very readily. This is why pro-life advocates must ask them probing questions: What is a person? What is consciousness? When does life begin and how do you know? What if we found out tomorrow that six-week-old babies could be saved and were thus, viable? If pro-lifers are constantly defending their perspective and not making pro-choicers defend theirs, they will lose. Plain and simple.

There is a better way to win. It is self-evident that one has to know what a person, woman, and man is before they can decide that a baby is none of those things. Since liberals have a notoriously difficult time crafting a solid definition of personhood, in no universe should they have their hands on the suction machine. All the rebuttals of “clump of cells” and “you’re not pro-life, you’re pro-birth” are claptrap that is meant to take this weighty discussion into the spurious realm of pathos.

As for the conservative movement, it is disturbing to me that Republicans are inching away from pro-life values in a bid to get votes. While Donald Trump is not a Christian and I correspondingly expect less from him, JD Vance is a card-carrying Catholic. I understand that “leaving it to the states” is his bosses’ platform, and I even think they are both right to remand the conversation to the community level. But verbally supporting mifepristone and misoprostol for use in terminating early pregnancies is not principled, as those drugs still kill a living human being.

Like JD, I also want women to “choose life.” But we cannot afford to be vague on what choosing life entails. Choosing life means not killing your children for the sake of your subjective comfort. I have no problem with a woman’s right to her own body (whatever that actually means), but the child has her body we must consider. She also has the right to remain in her mother’s uterus. Will we — mothers, fathers, abortion providers, and people of good will — deprive her of that right?

Many states answered that question for themselves this week. Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota made the right choice, while Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York did not. This is sobering, of course, but there is hope. After Roe fell in 2022, voters had sided with abortion rights every time the issue came up on a state ballot, until now.

I hope and pray that the pro-life movement can re-engage in the battle for hearts and minds. Our country’s rightward lurch this election is encouraging, but nowhere near a good predictor of our support for life in the future. Our culture is numb to suffering and violence, and even clinical videos describing abortion procedures may not be enough to prick the conscience anymore. But with God’s help, by sharing the stories of abortion survivors, former providers, and post-abortive mothers, and through supporting vulnerable moms, I believe we can evangelize our culture door to door. This debate may be seeping out of the national conversation, but that gives you and me more power to change the minds of our neighbors. Let’s get to it.