When Abortion Reporting Becomes Advocacy
The missing details in Pro Publica's heartbreaking stories.
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When a story goes viral about a woman suffering during a pregnancy emergency, my heart breaks — genuinely. These are real women, with real pain, and they deserve real answers.
I also believe the truth matters. And when I see the same media playbook used again and again to shape how people understand these rare situations, I feel a responsibility to speak up — because I think women and the public deserve the full picture.
In my latest piece for WORLD, I walk through the recent ProPublica coverage, what the reporting gets right, what it leaves out, and why I think the conversation around pregnancy emergencies and abortion law is more nuanced and actually more hopeful, than the headlines suggest.
We must recognize a few things the article fails to acknowledge:
No doctor has been prosecuted for providing emergency care since Dobbs.
Miscarriage care has never been illegal and never will be.
Every state has legal exemptions for the life of the mother at doctor’s discretion.
Doctors have wide legal latitude: Pro-abortion law professor Joanna Grossman has said physicians “have been erring on the side of being legally too cautious — allowing women to suffer and even die when it would have been legal to intervene.”
And yet the fear is real — and worth talking about — especially because it’s getting worse due to irresponsible media coverage and pro-abortion messaging.
I’m not asking you to agree with everything I believe here. I’m just asking you to read it with an open mind.
Miscarriage care and early induction, the most common and humane response to pregnancy emergency, have never been illegal — nor should doctors be fearful of doing their jobs in that way. Abortions to save the life of a mother are legal in every state, with wide discretion given to doctors. Treating ectopic pregnancy (removing the baby) has never been controversial to treat and still isn’t, even at pro-life Catholic hospitals.
For many years, miscarriage and miscarriage care have been medically characterized as “spontaneous abortion,” “Missed abortion,” or “incomplete abortion.” Medical professionals have always known the difference between this and an induced abortion — the purposeful killing of a living child in the womb.
There is nothing new about these distinctions. They've been part of medical practice and terminology for decades. But once Roe was overturned, many began claiming they were too confusing to understand—as if a distinction that had been clear for generations had suddenly become incomprehensible.
This all plays into what happened in Arkansas and other stories we’ve seen in the news in the last couple of years. Can we be really honest about this?
This article was originally featured in WORLD Magazine:
ProPublica is an “investigative journalism” outlet that is clearly pro-abortion. In recent years, they have published multiple in-depth stories on the perceived harms of restrictive state abortion policies. The purpose of those stories is clear and it’s time we exposed ProPublica’s political agenda.
Their gut-wrenching articles often highlight women failed by medical professionals—doctors who didn’t provide appropriate treatment when women experienced life-threatening pregnancy emergencies, such as miscarriage and sepsis. Those can be legitimate matters of concern, to be sure.
But ProPublica’s 2024 story on Amber Thurman, a young woman who died from complications after taking the abortion pill, actually showcased plain journalistic negligence. Thurman’s twin babies were already dead when she went to the hospital. It has never been against any law for doctors to remove deceased children from the womb. Yet abortion laws were blamed for her death.
Their latest story is no different, and no less difficult to read. Anyone with a pulse would feel for Emily Waldorf, who was 17 weeks pregnant and facing an imminent miscarriage that could threaten her life. This was a wanted pregnancy. The baby was still alive but dying. Waldorf was at risk for infection, though none had been confirmed. She was asking for a labor induction—where the baby would be born alive and die in her arms—not a dismemberment abortion.
This isn’t your typical abortion situation, which is exactly why ProPublica chose it. They purposely selected something rare and emotionally complex to make their case against pro-life laws seem sympathetic.
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*This Substack focuses on issue of faith, sobriety, motherhood, culture, Big Fertility, politics and more. If today’s topic isn’t your lane, stick around — I circle back through the variety of topics frequently :)
In situations like Waldorf’s, the standard of care allows doctors to carefully monitor the mother. If infection appears or is imminent, she can be induced, and doctors don’t need to wait for sepsis, only the first signs of risk. If the medical team determines the risk is sufficient, they can act—and this is routine. It’s also legal in every state.
Arkansas’s abortion law clearly includes an exception for medical emergencies, and physicians can exercise their medical judgment to determine whether a woman’s condition qualifies. So why didn’t Waldorf’s doctors act? Were they ignorant? Terrified? Guided by political motivation? “Our hands are tied behind our backs,” her doctor told her, before adding: “Tell your friends to vote differently.” Their agenda is clear. (Emily eventually received the care she needed in a Kansas hospital, after an ambulance took her there.)
The primary documented harm is doctors saying they were afraid to act. We are not talking about prosecutions, of which there are none.
Since the Dobbs decision in 2022, not one physician has been arrested for providing abortion care in a genuine medical emergency. The best estimates suggest approximately 1.14% of abortions involve the mother’s life or physical health—at least 10,000 cases annually.
Despite widespread concern among physicians about legal risk, there do not appear to be any documented cases of a physician being convicted or imprisoned for performing an abortion to save a mother’s life under a state’s medical-emergency exception since Dobbs.
The primary documented harm is doctors saying they were afraid to act. We are not talking about prosecutions, of which there are none.
Even some pro-abortion legal scholars have tried to correct this problem. “It is important for providers to understand that they have been erring on the side of being legally too cautious—allowing women to suffer and even die when it would have been legal to intervene,” wrote pro-abortion law professor Joanna Grossman.
Board-certified pro-life OB-GYN Dr. Christina Francis testified before the U.S. Senate that it is “very possible for us to discern when we need to intervene to save a woman’s life” and to make that call “well before death is imminent.”
Weighing risks and making real-time judgments is exactly what physicians do every day—in cardiac emergencies, risky surgeries, aggressive infection treatments. We trust their discernment in such situations. Nothing about an emergency pregnancy situation is categorically different. This is really not a matter of controversy in medical ethics or in the law.
Rather than help doctors understand they have wide legal latitude, the official position of the American College of OB-GYN (ACOG) is simply that abortion restrictions should be repealed. Well, isn’t that revealing?
For ACOG, the concern isn’t solely about protecting women in emergencies. It’s about dismantling the laws that make the 98-plus percent of non-emergency abortions illegal. Behind the outrage about abortion bans is the true objective—no restrictions on abortion at all.
ProPublica has yet to report on the climbing, documented harms of the abortion pill, which women are now encouraged to obtain illegally and use at home without any medical oversight. ProPublica’s coverage points in only one direction—ever—expanding abortion access. Their thinly veiled objective is to use women’s suffering as a vehicle for that goal.
We know that even if every life-threatening pregnancy complication were eliminated tomorrow, ProPublica still wouldn’t be satisfied. Their real purpose is to advocate for the expansion of abortion rights, and that’s what’s behind their “journalism.”
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Well done calling out the glaring omissions in these reports. The media usually skip past the fact that taking abortion pills can lead to complications requiring emergency surgery, as was the case with Thurman. Instead of digging into the risks of prescribing these meds without physician guidance, or exploring other reasons behind high maternal mortality rates that existed prior to Dobbs, they blame abortion bans. It's frustrating. I wish more people understood the factors at play and that women received better care from the medical community.
Thank you for reporting on what is grossly underreported.