Ever since Roe was overturned, we’ve seen a number of news stories where women have tragically died due to pregnancy complications or complications from an abortion. Abortion advocacy groups and sympathetic media outlets are quick to blame these deaths on state abortion restrictions, whether or not those restrictions actually had any effect on their care.
We recently had Monica Snyder from Secular Pro-Life on our podcast to discuss these cases. I highly recommend listening to that episode if you haven’t already, as I consider this article to be a companion/response to the podcast. Really, I’m just running a highlighter over a theme that’s been on my mind for many months now: many of these tragedies aren’t the result of abortion restrictions; they’re the result of a broken system that pro-choice liberals already agree is broken.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
While there are definitely exceptions, most pro-choice people identify as liberal or leftist. More specifically, they might consider feminism, anti-racism, and support for socialized medicine as core values or philosophies. As a result, these folks are likely to hold at least some of the following beliefs:
- The American medical industry prioritizes profit over patient care
- The American medical industry, especially insurance companies, regularly kill people by denying them vital care or delaying care via bureaucracy
- Medical providers are wildly under-resourced, understaffed, and overworked
- Women and racial minorities’ concerns and symptoms are disproportionally dismissed or downplayed by medical professionals
- The medical industry does not put adequate resources into researching and caring for maladies in female and non-white bodies, instead focusing on white males as the norm
- The lack of adequate social safety nets means that low-income workers often must choose between caring for their health and paying their bills
We don’t have to unpack whether these beliefs are right or wrong, or whether they’re exclusive to those on the political left (I imagine that for at least some of these, right-leaning folks agree on the problems, just not the proposed left-wing solutions). The point is that in non-abortion contexts, the majority of pro-choice people already believe that our systems, including healthcare, are broken in ways that kill people–especially women, and especially poor, non-white women. They’re already primed to understand that these problems go deeper than abortion restrictions.
On the pro-life side, regardless of deeper beliefs, we generally recognize that these tragic stories are the horrific symptoms of some other problem. To give a quick overview of just a few cases:
Nevaeh Crain – Nevaeh went to two different E.R.s experiencing serious symptoms. The first E.R. dismissed her out of hand without investigating her symptoms at all. The second E.R. sent her home, knowing that she was actively septic and not responding to their initial treatments. Nevaeh died because these hospitals did not take her symptoms seriously and did not meet even a basic standard of care.
Josselli Barnica – Josselli faced an inevitable miscarriage at 17 weeks, and her care team waited an absurdly long time to intervene with a D&C. Her care team cited Texas’s heartbeat law for this decision, and abortion advocates blame the law (which was grossly misinterpreted) for the delay that caused Josselli’s death. While these elements seem to be factors, a closer look reveals straightforward, gross malpractice on the part of the care team. After finally doing the D&C, her doctors didn’t even confirm a complete miscarriage, didn’t properly monitor her, and they sent her home with pieces of her dead baby still inside of her. Even worse, when she called to complain of symptoms, they dismissed her concerns instead of taking her seriously.
Yeni Alvarez – Yeni started experiencing complications with her pregnancy at only 7 weeks, and died from those complications at 31 weeks. Yeni’s doctors believed she needed to be hospitalized for hypertension, but Yeni could not afford the hospital stay or the time off of work she would have had to take to get treatment. Additionally, the rural hospital did not have the resources to provide the best care for a complex, risky pregnancy. Yeni explicitly did not want an abortion, and a lack of abortion access wasn’t what killed her—it was a lack of critical economic and healthcare support.
Pro-life advocates see these patterns of malpractice and lack of adequate support—even if we may not agree with pro-choice advocates about exactly how to fix them—because we’re already primed to find something other than the abortion restrictions to blame for these tragic deaths. Conversely, pro-choice advocates sometimes seem to forget the beliefs they already have about our broken healthcare system in order to center abortion rights. That’s a bit of an oversimplification—the average pro-choice person has a lot of understandable reasons for interpreting these stories the way that they do. But even though it’s not the only factor driving pro-choice people’s responses, I think it’s a big enough factor that it can help us answer an important question: what can we do to bridge this gap?
A lot of the work we do at Equal Rights Institute is about finding common ground, and helping pro-choice people see that the pro-life worldview actually isn’t all that incompatible with the beliefs they already hold. In this case, even if we can’t fully convince our pro-choice neighbors on full prenatal rights, I believe this is still critical common ground that we desperately need to dig into. We have the opportunity to connect with their existing beliefs about deficiencies in our systems and work together to solve those deficiencies.
The Practical
I want to be clear that the pragmatic reasons for emphasizing this common ground don’t hold a candle to the principled, moral reasons (more on that later). But it’s still worth thinking a bit about the practical benefits of helping pro-choice people see this particular piece of common ground.
For one, it can help you build rapport in a dialogue. If your pro-choice friend brings up one of these cases, you have the chance to speak their language and highlight something they value. Genuine expressions of anger and frustration over how these women were failed can go a long way.
I’m left-leaning myself, so it’s a bit easier for me to emphasize my beliefs about how our systems failed these women. I’m also someone who’s chronically ill and has experience with doctors basically diagnosing me with “having a uterus” and refusing to seriously examine my symptoms. Both of these things position me to make strong points that resonate with my liberal, pro-choice dialogue partners, and if either is true for you, I encourage you to lean into that.
For our more conservative friends, I suspect you have a lot of common ground here too. After all, even if liberals and conservatives tend to disagree on the solutions or root causes of problems, we still usually can agree that there is a problem. You don’t have to agree that every one of these tragic deaths was caused by medical racism, or that socialized medicine would solve everything. All you have to do is affirm that our current systems aren’t perfect, that this sometimes has tragic results, and you want to do what you can to address these problems at their source. And if you or someone you love has had any negative experiences with our healthcare system, and you’re comfortable sharing parts of that story, being vulnerable about how our imperfect systems have affected you can go a long way to a pro-choice person bringing their walls down and realizing that we’re on the same team.
There’s a second practical benefit to leaning into this common ground: if we can work together to address the root causes of maternal mortality and significantly reduce the amount of unnecessary deaths, we remove one of the most powerful weapons the abortion lobby is wielding against us.
These terrible outcomes and the way they’re being reported in the media is one of the biggest barriers to winning support for our cause. Fear is an incredibly powerful political tool. Even people who consider themselves pro-life are being persuaded away from legislating against elective abortion because they’re (rightfully) concerned about how these laws could impact lifesaving, completely morally justified care.
The Principled
Of course, the most important reasons that it’s so critical for us to highlight this common ground are principled, moral reasons.
None of these women had to die. In some cases, their babies didn’t have to die either.
There are real people, real families, who have been devastated by the loss of their loved ones. Not to mention the terrible pain and fear these women must have experienced as they were dying. They deserved proper medical care, and they deserve to be respected as more than political chess pieces. We need to honor them by doing everything we can to prevent this from happening to somebody else.
We’re pro-life because we believe humans matter. Many of us have religious beliefs that assign near-infinite worth to the human person. This shouldn’t just be about politics for us. We care about the lives of pregnant people just as much as we care about the children they carry.
This being the case, we must find ways to reach across the aisle and work with our pro-choice opponents on reducing maternal mortality. We need to be careful not to dismiss real medical malpractice and preventable deaths as mere pro-choice talking points, just like pro-choice people need to not pass off broader issues of medical malpractice as a pro-life laws problem.
The Practical, Again
I’m not going to prescribe any specific policy solution; that’s above my paygrade. What I will say is that this situation is literally life and death for thousands of real humans, both in terms of their immediate medical care, and in terms of the long-term viability of pro-life legislation. When the stakes are this high, we all—pro-life and pro-choice—have an obligation to put down our polarized, partisan tendencies and address the situation in a sober, serious way.
Most people reading this aren’t leaders with policy influence, and figuring out our part in this can be daunting. I want to leave you with some practical things you can do:
- Investigate efforts to decrease maternal mortality in your state, and find at least one policy or effort you can publicly support
- Are you an older mom with a strong spine and experience navigating doctors’ appointments? If you’re already close with a younger woman who’s pregnant for the first time, you can offer to attend appointments with her as a peer advocate, especially if she’s having difficulty getting doctors to hear her concerns. Or if she’d rather attend alone, help her write a birth plan, research and prepare specific questions for her next appointment, or practice with her exactly what she’s going to say. (Sidenote: my colleague Emily says this content creator helped her a lot during her own pregnancy. She has tons of helpful videos on how to ask good questions of your OB/GYN and decline procedures you don’t want during pregnancy!)
- And, of course, have dialogues with your pro-choice friends that highlight our shared concerns for these moms. Even if we can’t fully bring them to our side on abortion, we can still build powerful coalitions with each other to protect women and children.
Let’s find common ground with our pro-choice friends and save some lives together. It requires gently breaking down some emotional walls on both sides, but it’s worth it.
The post Critical Common Ground in Medical Tragedies originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”
