No, abortion is not medically necessary

Doctors facing mounting legal and professional pressure to perform abortions post-Dobbs reassert that there are no necessary abortions in medicine. The term “emergency abortion” is a scare tactic.

Soon after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued letters to doctors citing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requiring that abortions must be provided as “emergency care.”

The Biden administration reiterated that message in early July, in a letter sent to physician and hospital associations, compelling emergency room (ER) doctors to perform abortions to “stabilize” a woman’s “emergency medical condition.”

Public Ignorance, Political Gain

Recently the Association for American Physicians and Surgeons filed a suit after multiple doctors were targeted by credentialing boards and the U.S. government for their anti-abortion stance post-Dobbs. Public ignorance and confusion over a “necessary” abortion continues to permeate political language and Biden’s rule is yet another coercive attempt to install national abortion “must-haves.”

An anonymous Food and Drug Administration committee determines “arbitrary safety standards” and what defines “emergency use” and “necessity,” said John Seeds, former department chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and can then utilize those standards to hide and mislead the public on the point of abortion.

Seeds testified in favor of a bill in Virginia that would change Health Department standards for abortionists, requiring providers to report any significant complication of an abortion. 

“We should want to know if complications are clustering, and where,” Seeds told me. “I said, ‘How can anyone argue for ignorance?’ The pro-abortion people argued for ignorance. They said that in the subcommittee meeting. Disgusting. There is no professional intellectual integrity.”

Maternal-Fetal Medicine Advances

Since the legalization of abortion 50 years ago, huge strides have been made in maternal and perinatal care, with viability improving from 27 to 22 weeks gestation, said Dr. John Bruchalski, a former abortionist who now runs Tepeyac OB-GYN, the largest pro-life OB-GYN practice in the nation.

“What these ‘emergency abortion’ laws are saying is if there’s another medical approach to the situation, like real medical treatment or stabilization to closely follow the course of disease in the patients … you still have to provide an abortion if a woman wants it,” Bruchalski said.

The two primary situations when a pregnancy must be induced before viability to save the life of the mother, first-trimester hemorrhaging and ectopic pregnancy, have clear treatments that do not require an abortion, Bruchalski said.

“In [catastrophic uterine bleeding] you’re targeting the placenta and its removal because that is the cause of bleeding, the preborn child is not your target,” Bruchalski said.

In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, an OB-GYN removes the diseased segment of the fallopian tube containing the embryo.

“This is intellectually and scientifically not a direct abortion,” Bruchalski said. “The definition and the intent of an elective abortion is to terminate the life of the fetus. The intention and truth matter not only to the profession and the doctor but to the patient.” 

In the vast majority of cases of ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages, the preborn child has already died due to the disease, Bruchalski said. In either situation, targeting the child is never the intent and is therefore not an abortion, but abortion practitioners deceive physicians and patients by saying ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and elective abortions are all the same.

“This coercion is based on fundamental lies and half-truths, from beginning to end,” Bruchalski said.

Michelle Stroud Johnson, a registered nurse with a background in postpartum mother and newborn care, has worked in high-risk care and agrees that no emergency situation requires an abortion.

“There are sometimes reasons for early induction that require additional support for the baby, as the baby is not ‘ready’ to be born, but it’s essential for the well-being of the mother,” Johnson said. “However, there is never a circumstance that the mother’s health would benefit from the death of her unborn child. Even in true crash C-sections where mom has to be in the OR [operating room] literally within minutes, there is never a reason to end the baby’s life in the hope of saving mom.”

“The whole discussion of ER abortion of a healthy pregnancy is bogus,” Seeds said.

Telehealth Abortion Finds Political Support

The number of abortion providers has sharply declined over the past 40 years, but with the rise in chemical abortions and Supreme Court approval, abortion continues to be a pervasive problem.

“Seventy-seven to 93 percent of OB-GYNs do not perform abortions,” Bruchalski said. “From time immemorial, abortions and their providers were in the shadows and margins of medical practice because abortion was and is the killing and eliminating of a human being and does not belong in a profession that was there to first do no harm.” It is a “viscerally brutal and barbaric procedure for the physician and the woman and of course the preborn child,” he said.

Reinventing the dangerous “back-alley abortion” that abortion advocates once wielded as an argument for legalization, chemical abortions are “messy, dirty and dangerous … with no oversight and no follow-up care except the ER, and there they are counseled to say they have miscarried,” Bruchalski said.

“I thought personalized medicine was more genetically sound, scientifically sound, psychologically sound, anthropologically sound, anatomically sound,” he said. “Yet, when it comes to abortion, we use language to distance the woman from her unborn child, we encourage deception when asked about her medical history, and we can now provide the abortion without blood tests, doctor visits, or ultrasounds to confirm what the patient tells us about her last period for dating.” With telehealth abortions, there is no doctor visit, no exam, and no ability to date the age of a preborn child, he added.

Misinformed Consent

“The messaging from the pro-abortion community is replete with mis- and disinformation that distorts and often fabricates information about what pro-life medicine offers to mothers and their babies,” said Dr. Tim Millea, Catholic Medical Association health care policy and conscience rights protection task force chairman. “This is particularly true regarding ectopics and the nonexistent ‘ER abortion.’”

Medical oversight, developed to prevent or decrease medically caused complications during treatment, is misdirected during an abortion, Bruchalski said. “Words are used to obfuscate, there’s not a good data collection program, and it’s one smokescreen after another.”

Parents are not educated about fetal development and other procedural realities, Johnson said. “There have been many cases both of maternal health issues or concerns involving the baby’s health where the parents are encouraged to seek abortion. I’ve even heard of this referred to as a ‘compassionate abortion.’ But the reality is far from compassionate … babies absolutely do experience pain when they are ripped apart in the womb.”

Pro-life Care Is Better Care for Women

Pro-life doctors do not view the unborn baby as a “clinical problem” that needs to be addressed or eliminated, Millea said. “The focus is on treating the real problem or problems that are impacting the mother and child, in a manner that prioritizes the health and survival of both of them as much as possible.”

Defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the intentional end of the fetal life, abortion never equates to superior care, Bruchalski said. And life-affirming doctors never put a mother against her preborn child.

“Women are being lied to about the realities of abortion every day and then must live with the consequences,” Johnson said.

‘States Rights’ Approach, Professional Demise

Republicans running for office are vacillating on life issues, claiming emergency cases and states’ rights supersede the rights of the unborn and that abortion shouldn’t be eliminated through federal power.

“When Roe was the law of the land, Republican legislators could hide their personal beliefs on abortion behind the legality to gain pro-life support,” Bruchalski said. “Dobbs has forced them to be more honest and explicit about their commitment to life-affirming principles.”

Elites in charge effectively shut down discussion and debate, central to the scientific method, during the Covid pandemic, and the OB-GYN profession is following suit, Bruchalski said.

“Now in OB-GYN [there exists] the ruse that elective abortion is critically vital to reproductive health care,” Bruchalski said. “We all deserve better than this.”

Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.