ERI Update – Equipped for Life Academy is Launched!

In this update video, ERI President Josh Brahm announces the recent launch of Equipped for Life Academy, shares details on what comes with it, and pulls the curtain back a little at the technical nightmare that completing the course was. Finally Josh shares about the future of ERI, our 10th anniversary this year as an organization, and how we’re beginning to work with politicians on pro-life messaging.

The Pro-Life Message I Wish I’d Heard in High School

I don’t know about you, but there was a time in my life when I was absolutely terrified to tell anyone that I was pro-life.

Let me back up.

I grew up Catholic, went to K-12 Catholic school, the whole nine-yards. I knew that I was supposed to be pro-life, and I was pro-life, but I had spent maybe five minutes of my entire life thinking deeply about abortion. So when I went off to college, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

I went to St. Olaf College, where in the fall of 2016, the students staged a massive protest against our local pro-life pregnancy center. The pregnancy center was hosting their annual fundraising banquet in the ballrooms of our student union, and when the students found out, they lined the hallways waving signs, trying to stop community members from entering and raising money to provide free resources to pregnant and parenting families.

Yeah, it took me about two seconds to realize that publicly identifying as pro-life was social suicide.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

How to Respond to Pro-Choice Dishonesty

Last week, I wrote an article responding to ProPublica’s deceptive, manipulative, and in places straight-up lying piece about Amber Thurman. Amber died of sepsis, a complication of her medication abortion, after doctors waited more than 20 hours to perform the D&C she needed to remove the parts of her dead twins’ bodies that were still in her uterus. ProPublica heavily implied that the reason for the delay that caused Amber’s death was that doctors were worried they might be prosecuted under Georgia’s abortion law for treating her, when in fact 1) ProPublica itself admitted (buried deep in the article) that they could find zero evidence that doctors were thinking about that at all, and 2) Georgia’s law is stunningly clear that Amber’s D&C was legal.

This week, CNN managed to write an even more egregiously deceptive article about Amari Marsh.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

No, Georgia’s Abortion Law Did Not Cause Amber Thurman’s Death

This week, ProPublica published an article blaming Georgia’s 2022 abortion law for the death of Amber Thurman. Amber was a 28-year-old medical assistant and the single mother of a 6-year-old boy. In the summer of 2022, she found out she was pregnant with twins and decided she needed to have an abortion. Since she was past six weeks, she couldn’t legally get one in Georgia, so she drove to North Carolina, where she had a medication abortion. She took the first pill at the North Carolina clinic, drove home, and then took the second pill the next day as directed. Four days later, after an increase in pain and vaginal bleeding, she vomited blood and passed out, her boyfriend called 911, and an ambulance took her to the hospital.

Doctors diagnosed her with acute severe sepsis, meaning that the second abortion pill, which causes contractions and bleeding to expel a dead embryo after he or she is suffocated by the first pill, had failed to remove all of her dead twins’ bodies, and the dead tissue left behind in her uterus was causing an infection. The standard treatment is a D&C, or dilation and curettage, in which a doctor uses surgical implements to empty the uterus. A D&C can also be used as a method of elective abortion that kills living embryos and removes them from the uterus. But importantly, that’s not what was under consideration in Amber’s case. Her twins were already dead; part of their dead bodies remained in her uterus and was causing an infection, and the dead tissue needed to be removed in order to save Amber’s life.

Doctors discussed performing a D&C multiple times, and noted that Amber’s condition was continuing to worsen, but they did not actually get her into surgery until 20 hours after she arrived at the hospital. By then, her condition had deteriorated so much that she died on the operating table.

Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee, a committee of experts that investigates maternal deaths with the goal of advising on policies to reduce the maternal mortality rate, investigated Amber’s 2022 death this summer (in line with their usual lag time) and found that her death was “preventable,” that the hospital’s delay in performing the D&C had a “large” impact on her outcome, and that there is a “good chance” that if doctors had performed the D&C earlier she would have survived. ProPublica heavily implies that the delay in care that caused Amber’s death was due to doctors being worried that they would be prosecuted for performing the D&C because Georgia’s abortion law’s life of the mother exception didn’t make it clear whether that was allowed. Let’s look at whether they’re right.

 

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Team Thinking: When Loyalty Goes Bad

If you’re an American, it’s almost guaranteed that you know someone who cares a lot about football. (Maybe that someone is you!) Imagine watching that person watch their favorite team play their biggest rival. The quarterback makes a pass, both a receiver and a defender jump up toward the ball, their bodies collide, and the ball falls to the ground. Is it pass interference? You know for sure what your friend’s answer is going to be even before they inevitably yell it at the top of their lungs—if the defender’s on their rival’s team, then obviously it’s pass interference, and if the defender’s on their team, then obviously it’s perfectly fine.

Now, clearly this is irrational. Just because a defender is on your favorite team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him to commit pass interference, and just because a defender is on your rival team doesn’t mean it’s impossible for him not to commit pass interference. But the irrationality isn’t a big deal. We do lots of really dogmatic and irrational things when it comes to sports, and it’s fun and exciting and not a big problem, because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t actually matter who wins a football game (sorry).

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes