By Dave Andrusko
Just before I started writing this story, I forced myself to watch “Medication abortion battle could embolden right-wing war on science”. The gist of pro-abortion Alex Wagner’s interview with even more pro-abortion Michelle Goldberg is—as the headline makes clear—if you give anyone who does not subscribe to “science” an inch, they’ll take the entire track and field.
The launching pad for this diatribe was the lawsuit initiated by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine last November and heard by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. They asked the judge to issue a preliminary injunction ordering the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone or to withdraw the drug completely while the case proceeds through trial.
After many legal twists and turns this past week the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, pending consideration by the Supreme Court, “it would reinstate the stronger protections for the chemical abortion pill mifepristone that were in place before 2016,” as pro-life Rep. Chris Smith wrote. The pro-abortion Biden will, of course, appeal.
From Wagner’s and Goldberg’s perspective, this was just the latest example of the “war on science.” Conservatives and pro-lifers will go on and on attacking “settled science” because they operate in an “alternative reality,” fueled, Wagner laments, by “Christian doctrine.” (By the way, I wonder how long it took Goldberg to come up with “library of lies”?)
No doubt if they had a few extra minutes they would have bashed APR–abortion pill reversal. That’s okay because filling the gap is Michael Belmonte, M.D. who announced in an opinion piece for the Colorado Sun that “There is no such thing as abortion ‘reversal’.”
Anything besides the same tired old tropes? Actually, no. Dr. Belmonte trots out ACOG and the AMA—tireless proponents of anything related to abortion—to tell us such laws “ undermines this relationship by requiring physicians to mislead and misinform their patients with messages that contradict reality and science,” to quote AMA President Patrice A. Harris, M.D., M.A.
Then for good measure, Belmonte bashes Pregnancy Help Centers which he refers to “anti-abortion centers, sometimes known as crisis pregnancy centers.”
The anti-abortion centers pushing abortion “reversal” do not empower pregnant people but rather shame them about their sexual and reproductive health care decisions. They target vulnerable people who are looking for trusted and sound medical advice to steer them away from having an abortion. They use deceptive tactics to discourage people from making fully-informed decisions about their health.
What an attack which is heavy on scorn and light on facts. These women come to Pregnancy Help Centers, not because they are “targeted” but because they deeply regret a decision made in haste. The success rate is in the 60%-68% range and uses a technique that is an update application of a treatment used since the 1950s to combat miscarriage.
And so it goes—mischaracterizations on top of distortions on top of lies— the standard pro-abortion handling of “science.”