Abortion Advocacy: Changing Reality to Fit the Narrative

Once upon a time, a woman was in terrible danger. She needed help, but a dreadful ogre set many obstacles before her. With the help of a stalwart and resourceful companion, the woman overcame the obstacles and was saved. The end.

It's the standard fairy tale formula that we're all familiar with. It can easily be modified into a nice backstory for a superhero or action hero:

A woman was in terrible danger. She needed help, but a dreadful villain has set many obstacles before her. A hero stepped forward to save her but was unable to thwart the villain's plans in time. The woman died. The hero vowed that the woman shall not have died in vain, and decides to devote his life to defeating the villain. The end.

These are the two basic themes for abortion-advocacy political theater. Like any theater it has its stock characters:

• Sympathetic woman who wants/needs a safe and legal abortion
• Prolife villan
• Prochoice hero

The outcome always hinges on whether the woman, with the help of the hero, can overcome the obstacles and obtain the safe-n-legal abortion.

Every story that Big Abortion thinks it can use for political and public relations purposes gets rewritten to follow the formula. When the facts don't fit the narrative, they get taken out and, if necessary, replaced with some non-facts to flesh out any holes in the story.

Let's look at the abortion-rights movement's favorite morality tales to illustrate the need for safe-n-legal abortion and the dastardly nature of prolifers.

Rosie Jimenez had the resources to arrange a safe-n-legal abortion. Abortion rights activists could have chosen to show Rosie the path to that safe-n-legal abortion but chose not to. Instead they left her with nothing but impressions she'd gotten from a Big Abortion PR blitz, insisting that women like her would have no choice but a criminal abortion, Rosie she believed them, acted on that belief, and died as a result. The obstacle to Rosie's safe-n-legal abortion was lack of public funding. To fit the narrative some facts must be omitted: the $10 difference in cost between the criminal abortion and the safe-n-legal abortion, the $8 Rosie had spent on a cake the day before the abortion, and the $800 scholarship check Rosie had in her purse when she died. Rosie could have overcome her obstacle by forgoing a single cake and borrowing two bucks from a friend. But painting Henry Hyde as "the man who made Rosie show up to her friend's baby shower without a nice cake" would be a pathetic attempt to demonize the man. Omit a few key facts and Henry Hyde can be painted as a proper ogre.

Becky Bell had gone to her parents once before with a pregnancy scare and had been threatened with being thrown out of the house if she did it again. Afraid to approach her parents, she began investigation her options with the help of a friend. She died with brochures from a maternity home in her purse. There was literally zero evidence that she had even made up her mind to pursue an abortion, much less followed through on the decision. She miscarried while dying of pneumonia. But the word "abortion" -- a medical term for a miscarriage -- was on her autopsy report so that single word got elaborated upon and embellished and converted into a suitable first act for a narrative that would be useful for the abortion lobby, facts be damned.

Spring Adams was left in her abusive home for two months after her father confessed to police that he had been raping her. He asked for help with his alcoholism and mental health problems. There is no available information on whose idea it was to schedule an abortion, but health officials and prochoice activists did nothing to get either Rocky Adams locked up or Spring Adams removed to a safe place during the two weeks they were arranging the abortion. When Rocky killed his daughter in a murder/attempted suicide, Big Abortion blamed "barriers" to abortion access, because "She died because nobody was addressing the sexual abuse" doesn't fit the narrative.

Savita Halappanavar, 17 weeks pregnant, was diagnosed as being in the middle of a miscarriage when she was admitted to an Irish hospital. She asked that labor be induced in order to get the whole thing over with, since she was in a lot of pain. According to Savita's husband, the doctor refused on the grounds that since Ireland is a Catholic country, labor couldn't be induced while the baby's heart was still beating. However, nothing in Catholic doctrine or Irish law forbids assisting in the delivery of a moribund baby if the mother's life is in danger. Savita died because she was not promptly given antibiotics and thus developed a fatal infection. But "She died because nobody gave her antibiotics in time" doesn't muster prochoice outrage, so the facts were changed to fit the narrative.

Beatriz's doctors petitioned the courts in El Salvador for a "life of the mother" abortion due to the mother's lupus. The petition was denied on the grounds that her life could be saved via delivery of a living baby. The doctors chose a c-section, Beatriz recovered nicely, and her anencephalic baby girl lived for five hours after her birth. But since "She didn't need an abortion after all" doesn't fit the narrative, international abortion advocates are insisting that the procedure which clearly was medically, legally, religiously, and morally an emergency c-section should in fact be classified as a hysterotomy abortion.

Life advocates need to be aware not only of the existing template and Big Abortion's propensity to edit every story to get it to fit. We need to keep in mind that the abortion machine has friends in public health and the media and will thus be able to get information processed through their PR departments and released to the public before prolifers know what's happening. They were notified of Rosie's death by the CDC, Spring's pregnancy through health department officials, Savita's death through a Health Services leak, and Beatriz's health issues had to have been leaked somehow because it was confidential medical information. Every story is already going to be tidied up and spin-doctored before we learn of it, and we'll always be playing catch-up, unless we start planting a lot of moles in prochoice organizations.

The newest generation of life advocates is doing a phenomenal job of using the tools of the Information Age. I look forward to seeing what they do to keep a step ahead of the story tellers in the future.

International Abortion Movement Now Calling Life-Saving C-Section "Abortion"

The political theater isn't over in the Beatriz saga.

The script being staged by the pro-abortion Left called for one of two endings: a granted abortion with a live mother or a denied abortion with a dead mother. Either one would have provided the desired political and PR leverage. But Big Abortion got an ending they hadn't counted on: a denied abortion and a live mother. This accursed outcome threw a monkey wrench into everything.

The live mother/non-aborted baby outrages the abortion advocates. It doesn't fit the planned narrative. So they have decided to redeem the situation. They have opted to get back on script. and they're doing it by insisting that Beatriz's life-saving non-baby-killing C-section was actually a "hysterotomy abortion."

Yesterday in El Salvador, Beatriz (a pseudonym) had an abortion. The Catholic Church and the international anti-choice movement are desperate to deny this reality, so the anti-choice spin machine is in high gear, engaging in linguistic gymnastics to suggest otherwise.

And much of the media is taking the bait.

Beatriz had a hysterotomy, a form of abortion carried out through c-section....

In parroting what anti-choicers and the government of El Salvador are saying, many media outlets are glossing over and ignoring what actually happened in El Salvador.

In other words, even though prolifers, the government of El Salvador, and anybody with a modicum of medical knowledge knows that a c-section with the intent to deliver a living child is not an abortion, abortion advocates will insist with their dying breath that it was an abortion in order to avoid being embarrassed into admitting that a woman's life can be saved by some means other than killing her baby.

The New York Times, for instance stated that the “ill Salvadoran woman … delivered her 27-week-old fetus” and quoted El Salvador’s Minister of Health, María Isabel Rodríguez as saying, “At this point, the interruption of the pregnancy is no longer an abortion. It is an induced birth.” Rodríguez elaborated that it could be “either an abdominal or vaginal birth.” Meanwhile, Reuters uncritically reported that the c-section permitted El Salvador to avoid having to allow Beatriz an abortion.

How about that? The New York Times and Reuters went with the facts instead of simply reworking an abortion-advocacy organization's press release. It's no doubt infuriating for Big Abortion when the lapdogs don't obey commands.

Here's where they get really ridiculous:

Beatriz’s doctors knew ten weeks into her pregnancy that she needed an abortion to save her life, and even in El Salvador, a country in which doctors go to jail for performing abortions, her physicians began petitioning the government for an exception to the law.

 If she needed an abortion to save her life when she was 10 weeks pregnant, how is it that she managed to deliver a living baby at 26 weeks?

Doctors also knew something else: Beatriz was carrying a fetus with no brain, and therefore it could not survive outside the womb under any circumstance.

 Ah! See? Beatriz was carrying a "defective" baby. And if it's an absolute right to deprive a healthy baby of decades of life "on demand," then surely it's right to deny one of those yucky anencephaly babies a few hours of life outside the womb when her mother is sick. 

While the Ministry of Health agreed the abortion was warranted (again, a profoundly unusual circumstance in El Salvador), the Catholic Bishops, anti-choice groups, and the attorney general would not budge, threatening to put both doctors and patient in jail.

So the Ministry of Health agreed with the doctors who turned out to be wrong. Politics or medical judgment? Well, who turned out to be right in the end?

The turning point came when an international campaign was launched, and every relevant court and human rights body was petitioned. Yet despite pressure from human rights bodies in the region and internationally, El Salvador’s Supreme Court refused to budge, and Beatriz was denied an uncomplicated early abortion and subsequently also a less complicated second trimester procedure. She was therefore pushed into the third trimester, with her health failing to “save” a fetus that could not be saved. Finally, in the face of mounting international opprobrium, she was given a hysterotomy, which anti-choicers are spinning as though it were a normal c-section.

Thankfully, Beatriz has survived the late abortion and is doing well....

Damn you antichoicers for saving her life without killing the baby! But it was an abortion! It was it was it was it was it was! Because if doctors saved her life without breaking the law, we can't scream that the law killed her!

Now they change tactics and say that the delay in ending the pregnancy means that Beatriz "faces unknown health consequences," which translates to "So big deal, she's fine now. She might get sick later and it'll be all your fault, you antichoicers!"

They're saying that Beatriz is poor and saddled with medical bills -- for which the solution is for somebody else, perhaps the prolifers who certainly wouldn't mind, to pay the medical bills. We do that sort of thing for pregnant women all the time anyway.

Abortion advocates are angry because Beatriz's baby died a
natural death rather than being killed like this, by dismemberment.
Now they are trying to reclassify emergency c-sections as
"abortions" in cases where the baby has health problems.

They then go on to quote a doctor who explains the difference between abortion methods used at 26 weeks and he explains that for an abortion, if they can't get the cervix dilated enough to pull the baby out in pieces or to kill the baby first and then induce labor, "then a cesarian section is entertained. (Actually, we use the word, “hysterotomy” in these situations in an attempt to differentiate it from a delivery of a viable fetus)."

Here's where we get to the crux of how they're trying to classify the c-section as an abortion: Beatriz's baby was not "a viable fetus" because it had anencephaly.

So they're using the definition of "viable" used to distinguish the maturity of the fetus and rework it to cover any baby that has a fatal condition.

Ambra had anencephaly.
She lived for three hours.

This unnamed doctor notes that yes, a c-section is riskier than a vaginal delivery of a live baby, a killed baby, or a baby in the process of being dismembered. But the c-section in question being chosen for Beatriz was chosen by her doctors for whatever reasons they chose. They still had the option to choose a vaginal delivery. We don't know why they didn't but I'm going on the assumption that they had a good reason from a medical standpoint -- unless, of course, they chose a c-section rather than inducing labor to heighten the political theater by increasing the risk to Beatriz. Which at this point I wouldn't put past them.

Certainly the doctor who is writing to the abortion enthusiasts is part of the political theater. Look what he/she says next:

“It may be more palatable in the public eye that Beatriz undergoes a c-section,” the doctor continued. “However this is certainly not the preferred method [in the case of a] fetus that is anencephalic (absence of higher-function brain tissue) and therefore incompatible with life."

Actually, usually the doctors and the parents decide together which approach to take. A c-section increases the anencephalic baby's chance of surviving the birth process and living long enough to know what it is to be held and loved. Parents and doctors usually balance the mother's health and the family's leanings toward a natural birth versus possible time spent holding a living baby. 

So the abortion advocates are lying on multiple counts:

1. The court specifically said that the baby's life was to be spared, and that the living baby was to be delivered at the moment that was best for both mother and child.
2. The entire point of a hysterotomy is a dead baby. That is what distinguishes it from a c-section.
3. Both scheduled and emergency c-sections have been routine means of delivering babies whose mothers health or life is at risk for nearly a century, and that includes delivering babies with fatal conditions.
4. Even if the baby dies, be it from complications prematurity or from a terminal condition, that doesn't change the fact that a c-section performed for the mother's physical health is still a c-section performed for the mother's physical health.

Still, in order to be able to claim  that they were right, that Beatriz truly "needed an abortion," the abortion lobby is re-defining c-sections to be abortions if the baby dies shortly afterward. This is an insult and a slap in the face to every mother who lost a child after an emergency c-section.

How desperate and pathetic do they need to be? And how low can they sink?

UPDATE:

Thanks to Melissa for providing a link to this Spanish-language article, which certainly adds an interesting big of information: Beatriz had already gone into labor when doctors elected to switch from a vaginal delivery to a c-section to preserve her health. So not only was the baby not killed -- the pregnancy was not even artificially terminated! It was in the process of ending on its own! (Read it here run through Google Translate.)

What's the Spanish equivalent of "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"?