To the Editor:
I read Marvin Olasky’s essay (“Love Will Save More Lives Than Law,” Sep. 13, 2024) prepared to disagree with his theological rationale for opposing abortion and defending the “unborn,” but I was surprised by how many factual errors he made. He misrepresents abortion procedures and vouches for notoriously ideological “crisis pregnancy centers” as legitimate sources of medical care. These inaccuracies allow him to make a case for saving “unborn humans” without regard to the lives of the humans who carry pregnancies.
Abortion is a medical procedure. Banning it, as many states have since the Dobbs decision of June 2022, means that healthcare providers and hospitals cannot deliver necessary medical care to patients. Investigative reporters traced the deaths of two women in Georgia to that state’s abortion ban; women from Texas have endured one medical emergency after another since their state made the procedure a criminal offense. It is not clear from his essay whether Olasky cares about these outcomes. He suggests that Karen Cox, who fled Texas to receive an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy, should have carried the pregnancy to term, whatever the risk to her own mental or physical health. Anti-abortion activists have recently taken to insisting that there is a difference between an abortion and whatever it is that doctors do to help a woman having a miscarriage (medically speaking, a spontaneous abortion) or experiencing a stillbirth. That distinction makes zero medical sense. To quote a recent KFF report, “Almost all of the clinical interventions used to manage miscarriages and stillbirths are identical to those used in abortions because they result in emptying the pregnant person’s uterus.” Abortion bans have led to well-documented suffering, such as the case of Christina Zeilke, who nearly died before an Ohio hospital was convinced that she was hemorrhaging due to a miscarriage. She needed a medical procedure—an abortion—to save her life.
Laws have failed, Olasky argues, because laws always fail—and, he notes, have instead prompted numerous successful state ballot measures to reinstate abortion access. What we need instead, he explains, is love. But where is his concern for women bleeding out in parking lots? I personally support abortion as a person’s choice irrespective of medical necessity, but even Olasky’s love-based approach to healthcare should allow for a different response to human suffering. In fact, an outpouring of compassion drove those successful ballot measures. Abortion bans are less popular now not for any dearth of “love” but because more Americans have learned that outlawing critical medical care leads to impairment and even death. Those outcomes are not Olasky’s concern. They complicate what he portrays as a very simple life-or-death proposition for fetuses.
Investigative reporters traced the deaths of two women in Georgia to that state’s abortion ban; women from Texas have endured one medical emergency after another since their state made the procedure a criminal offense. It is not clear from his essay whether Olasky cares about these outcomes.
The crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) he celebrates similarly exalt the fetus at the expense of the pregnant person. They originate with the anti-abortion movement of the late 1960s, established by Catholic volunteers and priests who had moral conviction but no medical training, to urge pregnant women to consider adoption rather than abortion. Although advertised as health clinics, CPCs primarily offer free pregnancy tests and fetal ultrasounds. They have proliferated in low-income neighborhoods and medical deserts, intentionally targeting women who would find the offer of a free diagnostic and prenatal care appealing. CPCs also repeat the boldface lies that abortion causes breast cancer and infertility.
In fact, CPCs cannot even promise basic medical privacy to their clients: because they are not licensed medical centers, they do not have to comply with federal privacy laws like HIPAA. Nor do these clinics need to meet state or federal safety standards for medical facilities. Why on earth would anyone who supposedly wanted to build a world based on love, as Olasky does, encourage pregnant people to entrust their healthcare to an unlicensed facility?
I am not arguing the morality of abortion with Olasky. He is free to have his own faith-based convictions about when “life” begins and whether abortion is ever justified. But we need to call out the gross misinformation offered in the name of love by representatives of the anti-abortion movement. The life of someone you love might depend on it.
Rebecca L. Davis
Swarthmore, Penn.
A reply:
I don’t see any “factual errors.” Women obviously deserve protection, and any laws that keep doctors from saving a woman’s life should be changed. Crisis pregnancy centers are “notoriously ideological” only in the sense that Planned Parenthood centers are. They differ about whether the creature in the womb is a human being who deserves protection.
My central point was that some triumphalistic pro-lifers following the Dobbs decision misread American culture. With abortion pills widely available, women will be able to make a choice even in states that officially oppose abortion. Pro-life and pro-choice people should have one goal in common: Help women make an informed choice.
Marvin Olasky
Austin, Tex.