Posted on October 13,
2024
How Many Others?
Abortion pills don't only kill in
Georgia
by
Daniel
Clark
In their zeal to score a few rhetorical points in the presidential
election campaign, abortion advocates have brought a subject to light that they
should immediately be made to wish they hadn't.
Perhaps aware that their arguments are lacking in factual support, they
have been waging an extensive campaign of personal anecdotes, which by their
nature are difficult to challenge. Even
when their embellishments and outright lies are apparent, pointing them out
without sounding callous toward the sympathetic subjects is often too tricky a
maneuver to be worth the potential payoff.
They have now taken it too far, however, by trying to adopt dead women
as martyrs of the very cause that killed them.
Prompted by a completely dishonest series of articles in
ProPublica, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been spreading the baseless claim
that two Georgia women have been killed by that state's anti-abortion
"heartbeat law," so called because it restricts abortions after the point at
which a fetal heartbeat is detectable.
Even as they spin the tale from their own point of view, it becomes
clear to anyone who's listening that the true culprit is the abortion pills
those women took, mifepristone and misoprostol, originally known as RU-486 when
taken in tandem.
In
one case, the woman fell ill after taking these drugs, but did not seek help
until it was too late. The accusation is
that she must have feared punishment if she had gone to the hospital to be
treated for having had an abortion, but there is no provision in the Georgia
law by which she might have been prosecuted.
It is only the abortionist who is criminally liable. If this woman did fear punishment, it is not
because of the heartbeat law, but because of the deliberate misrepresentation
of it by abortion advocates in the media.
Regardless of the legality of it, abortion is a shameful
thing. Furthermore, in the case of a
chemical abortion done at home, the woman is likely to have actually seen the
results. It is perfectly understandable
why a she might be reluctant to go to a legitimate doctor and confess to having
an abortion. This would be the result of
the truth of abortion itself, and not any guilt trip or threat of legal
consequence that was imposed by Georgia Republicans.
Then there is this kindly advice from Planned
Parenthood, under the heading, "What happens after I take the misoprostol
pills." Apologies for its graphic
nature, but keep in mind that this is what happens if all supposedly goes well: "It's normal to see large blood clots (up to
the size of a lemon) or clumps of tissue during the abortion ... The cramping and
bleeding can last for several hours ... Most people finish passing the pregnancy
tissue in 4-5 hours, but it may take longer.
You may have cramping on and off for 1 or 2 more days ... It's common to
have side effects like nausea, diarrhea and sometimes vomiting from the
misoprostol." No wonder this Georgia woman
didn't get help sooner. If this horror
show is "normal" and "common," then how bad must it get before she is to
deduce that she is in serious danger?
The second, more publicized case involved a woman who
had been carrying a pair of 9-week-old twins.
She had gone to the hospital after suffering a complication that is
euphemistically called "retained products of conception," but for unknown reasons,
was not treated for about 20 hours, and died.
What ProPublica assumed for absolutely no factual reason is that the
doctors were hesitant to operate because they feared running afoul of the law. In reality, they cannot have had any such
concern, first of all because every anti-abortion law including Georgia's makes
an exception if the life of the mother is in danger, and second, because they
would not have been performing an abortion anyway. These babies were already dead and mostly
gone. What is meant by "retained
products of conception" is that placental or fetal tissue has been left behind
the womb. The abortion in this case had
already been done. The twins had been
killed. Only fragments, if anything,
remained.
So,
to summarize, these two Georgia women were killed by chemical abortions. Nevertheless, pro-abortion activists in the
Democratic Party and the news media publicized their cases so they could
absurdly blame them on opponents of abortion.
Their having done this is the only reason we know about it, which begs
the question, how many others are there?
Have there been other women killed by abortion pills in
Georgia, whose stories did not fit ProPublica's template? What about the other 49 states? The effect of the drugs would be the same
regardless of geography, so there is no reason to suppose them to be less deadly
in states with liberal abortion laws. Moreover,
why should we only notice the deaths they have caused since the Dobbs ruling,
when they had been in use for more than two decades beforehand?
Why was there such urgency to legalize them in the first
place, that President Clinton fast-tracked them for FDA approval by miscategorizing
pregnancy as a life-threating disease?
If the FDA originally approved the drugs for use between 4-7 weeks of
pregnancy, and with multiple doctor's office visits, what new information came
to light to expand that time frame to 4-10 weeks, and why does even that not
need to be verified? How was it decided
that it was safe enough that an in-person examination could by replaced with a
Zoom meeting?
If
Planned Parenthood cared half as much about women's health as it does about
killing unborn children, it would be warning women against mifepristone and
misoprostol, not advising them that the ghastly effects of them are perfectly
okay. That organization would be expressing
righteous outrage at the Democrats for repeatedly claiming that these drugs are
"safer than Tylenol," not parking a mobile mifepristone and misoprostol dispensary
across the street from the Democratic National Convention.
Instead of nonsensically blaming Donald Trump for the
two Georgia deaths because of his judicial nominations, the liberal media
should be demanding that he explain why he and J.D. Vance are now condoning
chemical abortion by mail. Rather than
lauding Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as champions of this thing called "women's
reproductive health," they should be calling Harris out for not calling
out Planned Parenthood when she visited one of its clinics for a photo-op. They should be asking Walz if the number of
women these pills are killing is any of his damn business.
If Tylenol really was no safer than these abortion
pills, it would be banned, even though it serves legitimate medicinal
purposes. The purpose to which mifepristone
and misoprostol are put is purely destructive.
That, perversely, is what shields them from scrutiny. As long as they succeed in killing children
in the womb, nothing else matters. As
for the question of how many women they are killing also, don't hold your
breath waiting for ProPublica to investigate.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press