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
Starting with the title (“She was accused of murder after losing her pregnancy”) and right down through the first 34 paragraphs of the article, CNN leaves you with the strong impression that Amari was arrested on suspicion of having taken an abortion pill that caused her daughter’s death. It says things like, “Her story raises questions about the state of reproductive rights in this country,” and quotes (without caveat, context, or counter-quote) someone saying that “[t]his case shows how pregnancy loss is being criminalized around the country.”
But if you read all the way down to the 35th paragraph, you’ll see this:
Solicitor David Pascoe, a Democrat elected to South Carolina’s 1st Judicial Circuit whose office handled Marsh’s prosecution, said the issues of abortion and reproductive rights weren’t relevant to this case.
“It had nothing to do with that,” he told KFF Health News.
The arrest warrant alleges that not moving the infant from the toilet at the urging of the dispatcher was ultimately “a proximate cause of her daughter’s death.” The warrant also cites as the cause of death “respiratory complications” due to a premature delivery stemming from a maternal chlamydia infection. Marsh said she was unaware of the infection until after the pregnancy loss.
Pascoe said the question raised by investigators was whether Marsh failed to render aid to the infant before emergency responders arrived at the apartment. (emphasis added)
So the office of a Democrat solicitor prosecuted Amari, not under any abortion law, but under child abuse laws, for allegedly refusing to remove her born, breathing infant daughter from the toilet when that was necessary to save her life. As Secular Pro-Life’s Monica Snyder has pointed out, the only way that’s at all relevant to abortion is if viewing a breathing infant as a person with rights is a threat to abortion. But most abortion-choice advocates have vehemently argued that those are two entirely separate things.
From what little evidence is available, I think it’s likely that Amari was treated unjustly in ways that significantly harmed her. She was held in jail for 22 days and then placed under house arrest for over a year, until a grand jury ultimately decided the prosecution didn’t even have enough of a case to go to trial with. I’m not saying Amari was treated well. I’m saying that to whatever (likely significant) degree she was treated badly, her bad treatment had nothing to do with pro-life laws or the pro-life movement.
CNN’s level of dishonesty here is impressive. I was angry as I read their article. I was angry as I read (and wrote about) the ProPublica article. I’m angry as I’m writing this now. You may be angry as you read it. And I think we’re right to be angry. But it’s also important to notice where our anger can be distorted to lead us away from thinking well and caring well. Here are three traps that we can fall into when anger goes bad.
The Trap of Smug Superiority
If you’ve been on Twitter (sorry, “X”) in the last week or so, you’ve probably seen some stunning displays of confirmation bias from the pro-choice side. Many pro-choice people saw these headlines, were already primed to expect that of course pro-life laws are causing women to die, saw what they expected to see, and said some pretty ignorant things as a result. That makes it really easy to feel superior: Look at all those idiot pro-choicers and their confirmation bias, you might think. But confirmation bias isn’t a pro-choice problem—it’s a human problem. You’re not qualitatively different from pro-choice people in a way that makes you immune. Confirmation bias and the poor thinking it causes are really obvious on the other side, and often much harder to pick up on when they happen on your own side—let alone in your own brain. So don’t let seeing it on the other side pull you into smug superiority and make you even less able to notice when it happens on your side. Instead, take the opportunity to remind yourself to watch out for it in yourself.
The Trap of Unfair Overgeneralizing
One way your confirmation bias can rear its head when you see bad behavior from pro-choice people is by causing you to attribute the bad behavior to the entire pro-choice side. If you don’t want to be blamed for the worst things some pro-lifers say (and trust me, you really don’t), then it’s on you to remember that the pro-choice movement isn’t a monolith either. Do all pro-choice people think something that’s a horrific human rights violation should be legal? Yup. Is that a big deal? Definitely. Does it mean that every pro-choice person is dishonest and manipulative like CNN and ProPublica? Nope.
Take the worst thing you’ve ever heard a pro-lifer say. Then double it, because I can just about guarantee there’s worse out there than you’ve heard. Then imagine a pro-choice person reading that horrible quote and saying, “Ugh, of course—this is what the ‘pro-life’ movement is all about, everyone!” I imagine that would strike you as wildly untrue and unfair, and you’d be right. There are absolutely pro-life jerks in the world, and pro-life non-jerks absolutely have a responsibility to call them out, or at the very least avoid giving them a bigger platform. But it’s not accurate or fair to assume that you must be a jerk because some pro-life people are jerks and you’re pro-life. That’s not how logic works.
But here’s the thing. If you see bad behavior from pro-choicers, like CNN’s and ProPublica’s flagrantly deceptive reporting, and jump to thinking of that as characteristic of the entire pro-choice side, then you’re being inaccurate and unfair in exactly the same way. It’s an easy trap to fall into if you’re not careful, especially when you’re angry.
The Trap of Killing Your Own Compassion
The third problem distorted anger causes is a lack of compassion where compassion is needed. When you read Amber’s story at the beginning of this article, knowing that it was going to be used to argue against abortion laws, did you allow yourself to feel the horror of what she went through, or did you shove down what you would normally feel because you knew what it was being used to argue for? When pro-choice people bring up someone’s suffering and use it to argue for legal abortion, it’s easy to feel like allowing ourselves to have compassion for the people they bring up is a threat—like we’ll be losing debate points or something. But it’s not. Compassion, especially for the suffering that pro-choice arguments tend to emphasize and pro-life arguments tend to brush past, is vitally important, not only because it makes you more persuasive, but because killing it harms your own soul.
So let yourself notice and feel your anger when it comes up, but watch out for the traps. Don’t let your anger be distorted to lead you into confirmation bias or out of compassion.
The post How to Respond to Pro-Choice Dishonesty 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.”
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