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Lie #1
"Abortion Is Health Care"
If I know anything at all about God . . .
I know that God hates abortion.
-R. C. Sproul
Halo Casiano was born in an East Texas hospital on March 29, 2023, weighing just three pounds. She lived for only four hours, taking her last breath wrapped in the arms of her father, Luis.
Halo was born with an underdeveloped skull and brain, the result of a birth defect called anencephaly. Babies who suffer from anencephaly are often stillborn, or survive a few days, at most, after birth.
Samantha, Halo's mom, was devastated by the diagnosis she received at her twenty-week anatomy scan. This was the little girl she'd hoped for, wanted, and for nearly five months, loved. When her doctor informed her that the baby's defect made her incompatible with life, she knew she needed an abortion.
To her surprise, however, that option wasn't available. While she was aware that Texas had enacted further abortion restrictions since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, she thought that her daughter's diagnosis would create an exception. But Texas's laws only permit abortions when the mother's life is in danger, like when there is an ectopic pregnancy (where the baby is growing outside the uterus, usually in the fallopian tube).
She had no choice but to carry the pregnancy to term. The weeks leading up to delivery were hellish, sending Samantha into a state of deep depression. As much as she loved her daughter, she dreaded watching her suffer and die.
"I didn't want to go to the doctor's office," she told NPR, who first reported on her story. "I don't want to sound hateful, but I don't want to see all these pregnant women, and I'm over here carrying a baby-I love my baby, but she should be at rest by now. I just keep thinking that over and over again-my baby should be at rest, I shouldn't have to put her through this."
Samantha quickly learned that simultaneously preparing for your baby's birth and death is not only traumatic, it's expensive. Living in a mobile home with four of her own children-including her nine-month-old daughter-as well as her goddaughter, she and Luis didn't have funds to spare for a funeral, for which she was quoted a price of four thousand dollars.
At thirty-three weeks gestation, still unsure how they'd overcome these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Samantha endured a painful delivery and finally met her wanted, fragile baby girl, Halo. She spent her last moments in the presence of parents who loved her and would have done anything to make her whole.
Managing to put together the funds to provide a funeral for Halo, Samantha and Luis buried their daughter on Good Friday.
Samantha vowed never to get pregnant again.
What "Empathy" Demands
Samantha's story is heartbreaking. As a mom, I can feel the pain she must have suffered during and after pregnancy. Imagining those precious, gut-wrenching hours after Halo's birth-holding her, tracing her little face, feeling her tiny grip on your finger, hoping against hope that maybe the doctors were wrong.
Maybe she's the exception, you think. Maybe she's the girl who'll defy all odds and live, fulfilling all the dreams you had for her. Then collapsing with an excruciating, confusing mixture of sadness and relief as you realize she's breathed her last breath, and that the daughter you'd carried and cared for would never grow up. You'd never hear her laugh, see her walk, know her personality. She's gone, and now you have to go home without her, facing the cold reality of everyday life's relentless demands. There's nothing that could prepare you for that.
I've now birthed three children. Like all moms, I remember everything: the surprise and excitement of the first positive pregnancy test, the first kicks, the nerves before the twenty-week scan, the anticipation and misery of the last few weeks of pregnancy, and the endless layers of emotional and physical experiences that accompany labor and delivery.
The love that you have for these children you've grown and birthed is indescribable and consuming. I'm sure Samantha felt what I feel as a mother-that I would do absolutely anything, make any sacrifice, for my children. I'd take their pain, if I could, do anything to ensure their well-being. Having children truly is like having your heart walk around outside your body. There's nothing simultaneously more painful and joy-inducing.
I first read Samantha's story in a piece by NPR, published a few weeks after Halo's birth. The article and accompanying Instagram post were clearly written to evoke sadness and anger, specifically from women like me, regarding the injustice of the family's situation. The comments underneath the article and post echo the piece's intent: That she was forced to carry the pregnancy post-diagnosis, forced to give birth, and forced to pay for a funeral, we read, is the unfair and cruel consequence of abortion restrictions and the overturning of Roe.
NPR seeks to solicit empathy toward Samantha, asking readers to put themselves in her shoes. The implicit questions are obvious: How awful would it be to carry a pregnancy you knew would end in the death of your baby? How stressful would it be to plan a funeral for your child while working, trying to make ends meet, and taking care of both yourself and your baby? How much easier would it have been for Samantha if she'd been able to have an abortion at twenty weeks? What if this were you? Would you want to endure this kind of painful ordeal? Shouldn't we remove abortion restrictions so tragic stories like Samantha's won't happen again? Plus, isn't abortion just "reproductive health"-another part of women's health care?
There was a time when I would have been the target audience for a story like Samantha's.
When I was growing up, topics like abortion were rarely discussed. I lived in the "before time"-pre the craziness of social media and nonstop news. My friends and I felt no pressure to have a formulated position on every social issue of the day. At the time, I didn't even really know what the abortion procedure entailed. I was just intuitively pro-life. Before my belief that killing a baby in the womb was wrong was the conviction that premarital sex should be avoided, both to align with biblical purity and to exclude the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion was simply one component in the network of sexual no-nos that occupied my brain as a kid raised in a Christian home.
But while I called myself pro-life through and after college, I held on to the belief that there were exceptions depending on the circumstances of the pregnancy. As a woman, I could have imagined myself in a woman like Samantha's position. I would have felt empathy for someone forced to endure such a trying few months. I would have agreed with NPR's implication-that these pro-life laws had gone too far and lacked compassion for dire situations like this one.
But today, even as a mother who can now more acutely understand the pain Samantha must have felt, I don't draw the same conclusion. My mind changed several years ago when, in response to a Facebook post I made stating what I thought was my staunchly pro-life position that abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormalities, and perhaps some other cases, someone challenged me. They asked a simple question: What's the difference between a child conceived in rape and a child not conceived in rape? In other words, why are diagnoses or the circumstances surrounding a person's conception justification for killing them?
I'd never thought about it in that way, because I wasn't considering abortion from the perspective of the child the procedure kills. I had fallen victim to toxic empathy, manipulated into thinking of only one part of the story without realizing what I was missing.
The fact is, abortion purposely kills an innocent person. In Samantha's story, that would have been Halo.
Where is the compassion-the empathy-for her? She was a living human being. Did her diagnosis justify an abortion?
Let's look at Samantha and Halo's story another way.
The Flip Side of Empathy
As always, there's a flip side to the one-sided empathy narrative.
As Christians, as thinkers, and as truth-seekers-people who care about what is "good, right, and true" (Eph. 5:9) as well as what's loving-we're required to go beyond putting ourselves in Samantha's shoes. We must consider this story from Halo's perspective.
An uncomfortable, often ignored truth is that, whether via abortion or birth, a baby is still delivered. If Samantha had been able to access an abortion at twenty weeks, she would have had to endure an extremely involved, painful procedure to end Halo's life-and she would still have had to deliver her child.
At twenty weeks gestation, the baby would have been small (about the size of a banana) but fully formed. She would have been aborted using one of two methods: an aspiration abortion or a dilation and extraction (D&X) procedure.
An aspiration abortion, which is typically performed between ten- and sixteen-weeks gestation, would have removed the baby via suction. First, the abortion provider places sticks called laminaria into the woman's cervix twenty-four to forty-eight hours before her procedure. This both opens the cervix and soaks up the amniotic fluid in the uterus, which is necessary for the baby's survival. Because of this, the baby is sometimes already dead by the time of the actual procedure, but many times they are not. Dead or alive, during the abortion, the baby's limbs, torso, and skull would have been sucked out of the uterus using a vacuum tube.
In a D&X abortion, which is usually reserved for babies after sixteen weeks of pregnancy, the abortion procedure starts the same way an aspiration abortion does-with laminaria to dilate the cervix. But because the baby would have been too big to be sucked out with a vacuum tube, her actual killing and removal requires more steps.
To "ensure fetal demise," as the abortion industry describes it, the baby would have been killed by the abortionist inserting a needle filled with digoxin or potassium chloride-the same poisonous chemical combination used in lethal injection for convicted murderers on death row-through the mother's abdomen into the uterus and the amniotic sac, and, if the baby stopped wiggling long enough, the abortionist could have injected the poison directly into her heart.
When the poison is released into the amniotic sac, the baby would have consumed it and died. When the poison is injected through her chest and into her heart, she would have had a heart attack that killed her.
At this point in the pregnancy, the baby would have gotten so big, and her movements have become so strong, that without the numbing medication that is used for women during this procedure, the mother would have been able to feel her punch and kick as she died. The baby is developed enough to see, hear, and, depending on her age, feel the pain of the abortion. While the existence of flinching, crying, and screaming by the child being aborted has been debated by doctors, I don't think we will ever know the horrific sights and sounds in the womb during an abortion. I think we'd go mad if we did.
And even more horrifically, abortions don't always "succeed" in killing the baby.
In 2013, registered nurse Jill Stanek testified before the House Judiciary Committee about her time working in the Labor and Delivery ward of Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. She described what it was like to discover that babies who survived abortions were being placed in a utility closet to die. She said: "I was traumatized and changed forever by my experience of holding a little abortion survivor for forty-five minutes until he died, a twenty-one or twenty-two-week-old baby who had been aborted because he had Down Syndrome."
Because there are only six states that require reporting of children who survive abortions, stories like Stanek's are more likely than we know. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that between 2003 and 2014, there were at least 143 babies who died after being born alive after an abortion procedure. There is a significant probability that that number is much higher.
In 2005, a mother attempted to undergo an abortion at twenty-three-weeks gestation at EPOC Clinic in Orlando, Florida, only to deliver her living, moving son in a toilet. She begged the staff to help, and they not only refused but turned away paramedics. She cradled her son and sang to him for eleven minutes until he died.
Sycloria Williams sought an abortion in 2006. She delivered her twenty-three-week baby at A Gyn Diagnostic Center in Hialeah, Florida. When she began breathing and moving, the owner of the clinic reportedly quickly cut the umbilical cord and left the child to suffocate in a sealed biohazard bag.
Infamously, now imprisoned abortionist Kermit Gosnell admitted to delivering babies and snipping their spinal cords as they were exiting the birth canal. It's difficult to imagine a more gut-wrenching scene: the life of a fully formed, viable child, on the verge of her first breath, preparing to instinctively search for her mother, violently snuffed out.
Late-term-abortion provider LeRoy Carhart, who died in 2023, explained in a 1997 court testimony how he performs third-trimester abortions: by injecting the poison digoxin into the baby's heart and inducing labor a few days later, so that by the time the dead, limp baby exits the mother's womb, the baby's body is like, as he said later, "meat in a crock-pot." In his testimony, he admitted that the baby wasn't always dead when he induced the abortion. In that case, he would have had to crush the living baby's skull and dismember her to ensure her demise.
While abortions at or after twenty-one weeks gestation are rarer than abortions earlier in the second trimester and in the third trimester, they still happen. The CDC puts the number at about ten thousand per year. However, the number is likely far higher, as only a handful of states are required to report their numbers on late-term abortions.
You might be wondering "What about earlier abortions, then? Aren't those better?"
It's true that most abortions happen in the first trimester. But scientifically, these babies are still equally human. They're just smaller and less developed. And killing them is still brutal.
Through twelve weeks gestation, women typically undergo medication abortions. First, the mother is given a pill called mifepristone. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, which is necessary for the new life to grow. Without progesterone, the lining of the uterus breaks down, which makes it impossible for the embryo or fetus to continue to grow. Essentially, the baby is starved of nutrients and dies. The second step is to give the mother misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and expel her baby. After a few hours of heavy cramping and bleeding, a "successful" first trimester abortion is complete-often at home, without a doctor's supervision.
The goal of statements like these—examples of toxic empathy—is to get us to suppress our opposition to a particular issue or point of view by playing upon our desire to be a good person.Highlighted by 319 Kindle readers
