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Some pro-life organizations urge anti-abortion advocates to stop saying, “Abortion Is Never Medically Necessary,” but I disagree, and here is why.
I started working in health care seven years ago — five of those years have been in critical care. I am not claiming to be a physician — I’m just a nursing assistant — but having worked with very sick pregnant women several times. Seeing all the interventions we have available in health care for women and babies alike in pregnancy has convinced me even more that we cannot let go of using the phrase “Abortion is never medically necessary.”
When we say things like, “Oh yes, I would support a woman having a medically necessary abortion” we are literally siding with Planned Parenthood and the abortion industrial complex who wants people to believe that they will never survive without being able to kill babies.
The truth is, it is genuinely never necessary to intentionally starve, poison, or crush the skulls of prenatal human beings.
So how exactly are medical emergencies handled with a pregnant woman?
Did you know that even pro-choice physicians in emergency medicine and many obstetric wards act in a pro-life way when they respond to obstetric emergencies? When a pregnant woman begins to decompensate (which means become increasingly ill in a dangerous way), it is normal for physicians to call for an emergency c-section.
Did you know that obstetricians are able to deliver a baby in just two minutes from the time an incision is made in a mother’s abdomen? It only takes two minutes from incision to separate mom and baby in a medical emergency — this is not an abortion. It’s real medical care.
Not only do emergency C-sections save women’s lives, they also give the baby a fighting chance at survival by receiving neonatal critical care. And even in the cases where, tragically, the baby can’t be saved, there is a whole field of medicine devoted to helping babies be comfortable and be treated humanely in their last moments — this is called neonatal palliative care.
So we chatted about the specific medical details of why abortion isn’t medically necessary; now, let’s talk about semantics. The pro-abortion movement is devoted to dehumanizing the unborn child and to convincing society that women would be dead if they couldn’t have an abortion. To accomplish these ends, the pro-abortion movement plays linguistic games, because the words we say and use have power. Thus, the abortion industry isn’t close to stopping their usage of the phrase “Abortion is medically necessary.” They live and breathe to convince women that they will someday be at death’s doorstep if they can’t have their child suctioned away to death through abortion.
I am not waving a semantic white flag to the abortion industrial complex.
All we have to do in order to use the phrase “abortion is never medically necessary” clearly and in a way that makes sense to a pro-choice individual is take the care and time to explain that medical interventions will always be available to save women’s lives in an emergency and that we don’t have to kill the baby in the process.
I have seen pro-life advocates who profess to be 100% against abortion say in conversations with pro-choice people “Oh yeah, that’s fine if a woman needed to have an abortion for health reasons.” The reason why some pro-life advocates are doing this is because they think it is helping them build common ground with the pro-abortion person to ultimately change their mind, but if we try to change pro-choice minds this way, we’re still waving a white flag to the abortion industry. We’re saying, “Go ahead, I don’t mind if you keep telling all women they’ll be dead if there isn’t any abortion. That’s fine.”
I refuse to let the abortion industry hijack linguistics and what we believe about critical illness in pregnant women.
The truth is, in real life, and in real emergency situations every day, women receive emergency C-sections when necessary and their babies receive medical care thanks to incredible NICU professionals. So it really is true — abortion is never medically necessary. We must not cease using this specific language as we seek to transform our culture to anti-abortion.
