Leah Libresco Sargeant has an important article over at Commonplace, from American Compass, debunking the myth that post-Dobbs pro-life laws are responsible for the deaths of American women.
It took until 2024 for The New Yorker to surface the first woman who potentially died because of an abortion ban. Writer Stephania Taladrid put the question starkly: “Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?” A close read of her reporting reveals the answer is no. Taladrid’s story was the first of what has become a genre of attempted abortion exposes featuring vulnerable women who face medical neglect that is cast as the fault of abortion laws.
Even when no abortion is sought, even when a baby has already died, abortion laws are blamed as the reason a paramedic dawdled in an emergency, a clinician failed to give a patient the information she needed, a doctor sent a septic woman home.
In some cases, misstatements about the law in abortion reporting put more women at risk. A woman reading these abortion death stories could be left to conclude that one doctor’s personal and severe negligence was in fact what her state requires of all doctors. This is false, and at least one woman appears to have died due to believing there was no hope in seeking care.
This is vitally important reporting. It may be routine practice for some doctors to recommend abortion as the only wise and expedient option to deal with a difficult pregnancy, and many women have unfortunately been convinced to undergo them in circumstances where there were other options, or where a second opinion or discovering a misdiagnosis could have shaped a very different outcome.
Even more vital, Sargeant shows how viral anecdotes carrying medical misinformation may be discouraging women from seeking the care they need to protect their own life.
Across the country, not a single state sets penalties for a woman who procures an abortion or for a doctor who treats complications that follow from abortion after the baby has died. Not a single state prohibits the removal of a baby from the fallopian tube in an ectopic pregnancy to save a mother’s life.
However, formal reporting and informal anecdotes shared on social media have falsely indicated that women should not expect to receive care—leading at least one woman to stay at home, dying rather than seek the care she assumed was out of reach.
Read the whole thing.