Last week, I wrote an article about the election (always a fraught thing to do). I argued that who pro-lifers should vote for is an important question and that not all answers are equally correct, but I also argued that how we think of and treat fellow pro-lifers who vote differently from us is even more important.

The responses I got were pretty much exactly what I expected. Some people loved the article, some people engaged thoughtfully with particular claims it made, and some people I lost completely as soon as I said that it’s possible to both be pro-life and vote for Harris.

If that’s you, I have immense empathy with where you’re coming from. I think Harris is very, very terrible—both her personal character and her policies, especially her policy goals on abortion, which are to make it federally illegal for states to impose restrictions on abortion at any time, for any reason. If she’s elected and she gets the congressional support she needs to succeed at passing that law, it will cost the lives of thousands and thousands of babies, including babies late enough in pregnancy that they can certainly feel pain and will die in agony. I’m not voting for Harris, and I think voting for Harris is the wrong choice.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

If you don’t vote for THIS CANDIDATE, you’re not really pro-life.

Just kidding.

I have good friends whom I know to be thoughtful, intelligent, caring, and passionately pro-life people who have all of the following plans in November. In random order (I literally used a list randomizer):

• Planning to vote for Harris. They see the way Trump handled the transition of power in 2021, and they are deeply concerned about how he would use power and what he might be willing to do to hold onto it. They also abhor the ways Trump has spoken about immigrants, women, and other groups of people. They see that Trump has promised to veto a federal abortion ban and explicitly opposed even some state-level abortion restrictions. They’re deeply concerned that if pro-lifers vote for Trump en masse, we’ll be communicating that Republicans get the pro-life vote no matter what they do, and cementing the GOP as a pro-choice party.
• Planning to vote for Trump. They see that Harris is making legal abortion at any time for any reason the center of her campaign. They may think many of Trump’s actions and his recent statements about abortion are really, really bad, but they would rather have a president like Trump who has said he would veto federal abortion restrictions than a president like Harris who has said she’ll do everything in her power to make sure there can’t be abortion restrictions even at a state level. Some also think that when both presidential candidates are horrible, we should vote based on the broader worldview of the parties, and they see the Republican party more broadly as in line with their values.
• Planning to vote for Peter Sonski (American Solidarity Party), or another pro-life third-party candidate. They see that their single vote is statistically certain not to determine whether Trump or Harris wins. They think that they still have strong reasons to vote, but they also think that, because their vote isn’t going to determine who wins, they do not have strong reasons to restrict their vote to one of the two major party candidates, especially when they detest the directions both parties are going to the point that they think it would be morally wrong for them to vote for either. With the current Republican party’s pro-choice party platform and full-throttled support for Trump, they don’t see either major party as in line with their values. They believe voting for a third party sends that message of active rejection to the major parties more strongly than not voting.

Sidenote: Regardless of who you vote for, you should check out Sonski’s fantastic work winsomely advocating for pro-life policies. He’s taken ERI’s Equipped for Life course and sought us out for individual advanced messaging consulting, and he’s one of the most intentional, clear, and effective pro-life politicians out there at communicating about abortion. We at ERI have diverse views about who to vote for, but we’re unanimous that Sonski is awesome.¹

• Planning not to vote in the presidential election. They see that their single vote is statistically certain not to determine whether Trump or Harris wins the election. They don’t believe we have a duty to vote, and they view both Trump and Harris as too morally evil to vote for without compromising oneself. And even in races where there are morally acceptable candidates, they also think it’s more appropriate not to vote unless you’re sufficiently read up on what you’re voting about to understand the best arguments on both sides, instead of letting your vote be determined by the one side you happen to have heard.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

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

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