No, Abortion Bans Don’t Stop Pregnant Women From Getting Medical Care at ERs

A Friday Associated Press (AP) article implied that pro-life laws in states such as Texas and Florida are causing women to be turned away from emergency rooms.

Pro-abortion activists quickly began to circulate the article in order to attack so-called abortion “bans.”

“Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade,” AP health policy reporter Amanda Seitz wrote in the article.

“One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to check her in,” Seitz wrote.

“Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility,” she continued. “And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.”

“The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide,” Seitz added.

“These bans are hurting ALL WOMEN,” lawyer Amee Vanderpool wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning, along with a link to Seitz’s article. Vanderpool’s post received over 40,000 views in just eight hours.

Some local news outlets even picked up the AP story.

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WOOD-TV, an NBC affiliate based in the battleground state of Michigan ran the piece verbatim.

In response to WOOD-TV’s post of the article, one X user accused the network of perpetuating propaganda.

“Nice try [WOOD-TV],” the user wrote. “[W]omen don’t go to the Emergency Room for abortions. Has nothing to do with the [Dobbs] ruling. Just stop your pathetic propaganda.”

OB-GYN Dr. Ingrid Skop and attorney Mary Harned confronted the pro-abortion narrative that pro-life laws “hurt” women in a 2022 report for the Charlotte Lozier Institute titled, “Pro-Life Laws Protect Mom and Baby: Pregnant Women’s Lives are Protected in All States.”

In their report, Skop and Harned stated that the narrative is rooted in “myths being spread by those more concerned with promoting abortion than women’s health.”

“[E]ach [pro-life] law reviewed does not prevent mothers from receiving the medical care necessary,” wrote Skop and Harned. “A plain reading of any of these statutes easily refutes the false and dangerous misinformation being spread by pro-abortion activists.”

“Further, none of the laws reviewed prohibit a medical professional from acting as necessary when facing a life-threatening medical emergency,” they continued.

Also on Friday – the same day AP published its controversial article – Skop wrote a piece in Higher Ground Times (a project of The Washington Times) confronting the same pro-abortion narrative.

“There is a distinct difference between abortion and medical care,” the OB-GYN wrote:

The aim of abortion is to end an unborn human’s life. Laws protecting unborn life do not affect treatment for a miscarriage. Nor do they prevent treatment of an ectopic pregnancy, which poses a risk to the mother’s life. The vast majority of abortions are performed for social and financial reasons.

“Abortion can and does harm women emotionally, physically, psychologically and socially,” the doctor stressed.

LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

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