Abortion Bans and Women’s Welfare: Are the Laws Really to Blame?
Jacqueline Abernathy
Jacqueline Harvey Abernathy, Ph.D.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned four years ago, abortion advocates insisted that protecting unborn children from intentional death would assuredly cause the deaths and other suffering of women. Since the Dobbs decision, there seems to be no tragic circumstance that isn’t blamed on abortion bans. This makes it difficult to discern what may be actual flaws in these policies, rather than human error — or worse, medical malpractice and gross negligence.
Political Props?
The situation raises the question of whether the victims of unnecessary delays or denial of care during a miscarriage are being exploited as political props on purpose by abortion proponents. Proponents who would have them suffer needlessly simply to make a point — especially if it happens to be an anti-abortion advocate who does the suffering.
Kat Cammack
Case in point: I have seen an entire host of libelous media reports (see this example) regarding pro-life Representative Kat Cammack, who had to fight hospital staff regarding Florida law for hours before being treated for her ectopic pregnancy. Representative Cammack debated with medical personnel for two hours over the simple standard of care when an embryo implants and grows in a dangerous place outside the uterus.
When I first saw a headline suggesting the representative was a hypocrite for being anti-abortion and yet having an abortion herself (which, again, is a libel only corrected if the reader investigates past the headline), it makes me wonder. How many cases are opportunistic ploys to create suffering to expose issues within an abortion law that don’t truly exist? As opposed to actual gaps and flaws in the policies or practitioners that do deserve our attention.
The Premise is Wrong
The premise of arguments that insist women will die unless children are completely disposable is simply wrong. Pregnancy is a unique condition where two humans naturally co-exist. This can come at the expense of the mother. There certainly are trade-offs and difficult cases. I maintain a woman has the right to protect herself if the child she’s carrying presents an immediate or irreversible threat to her health.
This is why early delivery should always be an option, even if it’s too early for the child to survive. It’s not necessary to kill a child prior to delivery. The reason for doing this is that killing the baby is the goal, not just ending a pregnancy when a fetal or maternal health concern mandates it.
Delivering a child before viability because their mother’s health and safety is threatened isn’t unethical simply because the child is too young to survive. It only becomes so when the intent is killing that child.
Considering two humans with their own respective interconnected health needs, when those needs come into conflict, it’s an ethical conundrum. The stakes are typically not equal because the baby will die until they gestate to a certain point. It’s rare that a mother has a comparable risk until after that point where she could deliver the child prematurely.
The provisions of abortion bans that protect viable human life from deliberate destruction aren’t the problem. Said destruction is never indicated (delivery, yes, but destruction, no). It’s just easier to altogether write off one party in any conflict so another wins by default regardless of the situation, the options, the nuances.
This is why it’s expedient to dismiss a human child as disposable, rather than weigh their human interests. This doubles the liability for doctors who, regardless of their convictions on abortion, often crave a safe harbor where they know their actions are within the law by legally having only one patient to prioritize when treating someone who’s pregnant rather than weighing complicated trade-offs between two patients at the same time.
Is it any surprise then when we see cases where physicians hide behind their fear of delivering the life-saving treatment they’re ethically obligated to provide, when these cases are easily exploitable to change the law to where they can completely disregard the welfare of an entire human being?
I absolutely support reforming any ambiguity in state laws that make physicians apprehensive to follow the standard of care. The physicians like those who refused to treat Rep. Cammack were either ignorant of the laws governing their profession or complacent when those laws affront the standard of care. This is what needs fixing, not the aspects of the law that prohibit killing one of their patients on purpose.
Adriana and Chance Smith
Abortion bans are also blamed in situations where the law doesn’t even apply. Abortion advocates can take advantage of any tragedy to fault laws that protect unborn babies for unfortunate consequences of completely unrelated circumstances.
Perhaps the most well-known case is how Georgia’s abortion law was widely (but incorrectly) cited as the reason Adriana Smith was kept alive artificially after succumbing to multiple blood clots in her brain at 9 weeks pregnant with her son Chance. Numerous legal scholars and the Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr confirmed abortion laws wouldn’t apply in the case of a deceased woman who happened to be pregnant. The purpose wasn’t to terminate the pregnancy.
Since Ms. Smith was deceased and Chance was still alive, the physicians opted to care for their surviving patient. This was according to the state end-of-life statute that prohibits enforcement of an advance directive for permanently unconscious or terminal patients if there’s a viable baby’s life to also consider.
People have the human right to refuse to submit their bodies to burdensome or futile treatment they don’t want. Advance directives safeguard that right when no other life is at stake. But in this case, there was another life at stake. There was no directive to defy in order to protect the life that remained.
The ensuing weeks that Ms. Smith’s life was maintained with machines while Chance grew old enough to be delivered at just 21 weeks didn’t cause her any suffering. It would be something most loving mothers would insist upon, so that their child could live.
Chance has been discharged from the hospital and lives with his father. I recall many people admitted they hoped that he would die. They were afraid his survival would validate continued life support for braindead pregnant women in the future, reducing women to incubators.
I would never support the unethical imposition of unwanted medical care on a patient against their will, but Ms. Smith had voiced no objection to continuing to carry her own son. Moreover, what killed Ms. Smith had nothing to do with abortion laws designed to protect her son Chance. Nor did abortion laws require her to remain on life support. Yet almost every headline I saw (see this example) cites the Georgia “heartbeat” law as the reason she was not allowed to die sooner, absent any concern for her son who is alive today because of it.
Law Enforcement Errors
Then there were predictions about women being falsely accused of miscarriages or jailed for procuring an abortion in states where it’s prohibited. So far, the anecdotal evidence also points to human failure by law enforcement rather than aspects of the law itself.
The status quo in most states is to prosecute abortion providers, not those who procure the abortion for themselves. This is for moral and logistical reasons; it’s difficult to know beyond reasonable doubt what was a natural loss vs. induced. To attempt to investigate this involves a massive violation of privacy against an innocent person.
Also, questions of culpability and extenuating circumstances matter. A woman who was misinformed regarding fetal development or the risks to her health or livelihood, or someone who is coerced under threat of violence or abandonment, isn’t as culpable as someone who’s informed and acts without duress.
Instead of targeting women for the crime of allegedly killing their individual babies, I support enforcing abortion laws by focusing investigations on abortion providers. There’s observable evidence of them helping to kill countless babies, they’re fully aware of what they’re doing, they’re acting freely, and worst of all, they’re profiting from women in vulnerable situations.
I liken this strategy to criminalizing the buying of sex rather than the selling of it. Legal prostitution inherently legitimizes abuse and danger towards those who may be unable to consent due to drug addictions, sex trafficking or extreme poverty, but jailing people in those circumstances doesn’t help them either. Prosecuting people who take advantage of these people does.
Laws that protect unborn children likewise focus on abortion sellers, not abortion buyers. This is precisely what Texas law does. Yet there was the high-profile wrongful arrest of Lizelle Gonzales in 2022 following her self-induced abortion at 19 weeks. The charges were dropped after 3 days, but Gonzales spent two of those days in jail because those who arrested her were woefully incompetent and ignorant of the law. The issue here, then, was not the law. It was law enforcement. In this case the law should be upheld, and police officers need to undergo further training on this issue.
Wrongly Blaming the Abortion Laws
Abortion advocates have blamed any laws that acknowledge the humanity of the unborn long before the Dobbs decision. In 2019, Planned Parenthood blamed Alabama’s recognition of fetal personhood for the grand jury indictment of manslaughter for the unintentional death of Marshae Jones’ five-month-old unborn child for not removing herself from the fight where the actual killer shot her and her child. These charges were dismissed when her attorneys pointed out that the statute that defined manslaughter explicitly forbade prosecuting women in regards to their pregnancy.
It appears that the loudest voices blaming abortion laws for any negative consequences to women are looking to manufacture misplaced outrage rather than actually help the women. They milk the women’s tragedies to manipulate the public into believing that women are in danger unless their children are disposable.
Laws protecting unborn children need not unjustly affect women. If and where the laws truly are the problem, that’s a call to reform these policies, not strip unborn children of the right to exist free from violence.
The mere fact that pro-life laws are so routinely misrepresented as causing harm to women even when the law or circumstance doesn’t apply suggests it’s not the laws that are the problem. It’s those so desperate to repeal them that they resort to deception like this.
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For our posts on similar topics, see:
Is There a Post-Dobbs Back Alley? The Record on Women’s Abortion-Related Deaths
Is an Embryo More Important than a Woman?
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