Calculated Cruelty (Part II)

The campaign to force women to carry nonviable pregnancies is ramping up

Start by reading Part I of Calculated Cruelty:

Calculated Cruelty

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If you didn’t know before, you certainly know now: Anti-abortion activists and legislators want to force women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. This isn’t just a belief they have, or something conservative organizations will occasionally admit in a press release or at an event. Banning abortions for nonviable pregnancies is a central part of the movement’s political and cultural plan for the entire country.

Now, with stories like Kate Cox’s going viral, anti-abortion groups and lawmakers have been ramping up their efforts around the issue—and revealing their cruelty in the process.

If you didn’t read the first part of “Calculated Cruelty,” I really recommend doing so. It provides a comprehensive background that’s useful both for this piece and for understanding anti-abortion trends moving forward.

The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses. They’re not just targeting legislation, but individual women—embedding themselves in hospitals, doctors’ offices and anywhere else patients might be getting bad news about their pregnancy.

Worst of all, these groups are calling it “prenatal diagnosis counseling” and perinatal hospice care*—manipulating women in their most vulnerable life moments under the guise of offering real help. That characterization is also politically strategic: it means that when Democrats oppose funding to anti-abortion groups that lie to women about their fetal diagnoses, the GOP can claim that they’re actually callously refusing women counseling and care.

Since I published “Calculated Cruelty” in October, I’ve watched this campaign gain steam in all the ways I feared it would. And with so much of our attention drawn in different directions, it’s vital that we’re watching this particular strategy carefully. Because we’re going to see a lot more of it.

Conservatives’ carefully honed messaging, for example, is already out in the world. Just yesterday, I told you how Vivek Ramaswamy claimed on NBC that Kate Cox’s pregnancy was viable, telling reporters, “That child absolutely could have been alive if that pregnancy was taken to term.”

In addition to the absolute horror and hubris of that statement, what’s important to note is how Ramaswamy mirrored the language I warned about in October—arguing that the term ‘viable’ is vague. Remember, the anti-abortion movement has rejected ‘viable’ and ‘nonviable’, and is working to get legislators and medical professionals to do the same.

Terms about viability are just one part of a broader push to change medical and legislative language, all in an attempt to obscure the truth about fatal fetal diagnoses. Anti-abortion groups also want doctors to call fatal fetal diagnoses “life limiting,” and to use the term “maternal fetal separation” when a person has a life-saving abortion.

The goal isn’t just to confuse and mislead people about their pregnancies, but to divorce abortion from healthcare—bolstering the lie that abortion is never necessary to save someone’s health or life.

We’re seeing this is in action right now, as Republicans in Texas and Idaho fight for the right to deny women life-saving emergency abortions. When the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas emergency room doctors don’t have to follow federal law around life-saving and stabilizing treatment, Rewire’s Jessica Mason Pieklo pointed out that the decision “effectively says abortion is always ‘elective’ and never required.” (I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: Of course they want us dead.)

The cruelty of what this means in practice cannot be overstated. Because conservatives’ strategy to stop women from ending doomed pregnancies isn’t just legislative—it’s about ensuring individual patients never know the truth about their diagnoses in the first place.

Consider the heartlessness it takes to go to someone who has just been given the worst news of their life and then lie to them about what it means. Or to keep that information from them entirely: one of the goals of this initiative is to make it difficult, if not impossible, for pregnant women to get prenatal tests at all. (More on this in Part I)

In the absence of dissuading or preventing someone from accessing prenatal testing, the anti-abortion movement wants to force doctors to lie to patients about the results. This isn’t without precedent: After all, Republicans have already passed laws in multiple states that mandate doctors lie to women about the risks of abortion. Now these same groups and lawmakers want to make medical providers tell patients that their prenatal test results could be wrong, and that they may be ending a completely healthy pregnancy.

It is a profound, profound cruelty. And it’s already happening.

This week, The Catholic Spirit spoke to Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist who works with Be Not Afraid, one of the groups behind this anti-choice campaign. I want you to read what she says to patients who have just found out that their pregnancies aren’t viable: “Congratulations.”

“I love reminding them that the first diagnosis is, ‘it’s a baby,’ and no other diagnosis ever negates diagnosis number one. The baby is inherently valuable and worthy of our love.”

I’m going to say this with all the restraint I have in my soul: I cannot believe someone hasn’t knocked this lady out. I mean really. Congratulations??

What’s even worse is the guilt and shame she directs at parents: “Even if I can’t completely fix or heal someone, that’s never an excuse for abandoning them,” Pierucci says.

This isn’t just one doctor doing terrible things. We’re talking about a powerful set of organizations that trains medical professionals, and passes legislation to make sure patients given awful diagnoses are sent their way. In Indiana, for example, women who want abortions under the ‘exception’ for pregnancies with fatal fetal abnormalities must be given a brochure about perinatal hospice services that directs them to anti-abortion groups just like Be Not Afraid.

And Kristen Day, the executive director of Democrats for Life of America, says that her group is in the process of drafting legislation that would require “training and increasing the number of perinatal hospice nurses to support and inform the women who receive a prenatal diagnosis.” I’m sure you can imagine what the nature of that “training” would be.

That’s part of the reason that conservatives are focusing so heavily right now on the fight for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Anti-abortion centers are ground zero for this initiative: these are the groups who coordinate and provide the so-called prenatal counseling and perinatal hospice “training,” and they’re the activists who have volunteers on the ground in community after community across the country.

So over the last few months, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers have been pushing back against the Biden Administration and state leaders who want to reduce funding for these centers and require them to stop lying to women. (Incredibly, the groups claim that such mandates are a violation of their free speech.)

Conservatives know that centers like these are the primary way to put their plan into action, and to target individual women. That’s precisely why it’s so important for us to focus on these groups, too—we need to make sure that they’re exposed, and kicked out of our neighborhoods and hospitals.

I know I’ll have more on this particular disgusting initiative in the coming months, but for now I want to leave you with this reminder: Republicans know what they’re doing. They know that their laws will hurt and kill women. And for all their rhetoric about saving babies, they also know that more infants will die as a result of this work.

When news broke that Texas’ infant mortality rate went up by over 11% after the state banned abortion, anti-choice groups responded that it was actually a good sign. Michael New from the Charlotte Lozier Institute wrote that the rise in infant deaths meant that Texas’ law was “preventing unborn children from being aborted due to their medical condition.”

Don’t ever let people forget that Republicans are willing to watch women and babies suffer and die in service to their cause. And their cause has never, and will never, be us.

*Prenatal counseling and perinatal hospice are real and important things—but the anti-abortion movement is co-opting the language of these credible services to pressure and force women to carry doomed pregnancies to term.