Is Honesty Too Much To Ask?

The anti-abortion movement should tell the truth about what they want and why. But then, of course, they'll lose.

Photo by Elsa Olofsson on Unsplash

The American anti-abortion movement is at once internally emboldened and externally hobbled. They achieved what has been for almost 50 years their ultimate goal — overturning Roe v. Wade and ending the era of legal abortion in the United States — and now they are facing the consequences and the backlash.

The consequences: Women losing their uteruses and their fertility, women almost dying, children forced to carry pregnancies against their will, women miscarrying going medically neglected for days until they get extremely and unnecessarily ill.

The backlash: American voters fed up with these cruel authoritarians and kneecapping Republicans at the ballot box. Mass media coverage of what “pro-life” laws do, how women and infants are more likely to die in “pro-life” states than in pro-choice ones, and how badly “pro-life” states neglect mothers and babies once they’re born. Abortion rights roundly held up or expanded when voters were given the power to cast their ballots directly. And more will certainly come as the anti-abortion movement pushes its vastly unpopular agenda forward.

This, of course, has not stopped the anti-abortion movement from pushing its agenda forward. And perhaps the most important case to watch right now is one that should really be a nonissue because it is flatly absurd, but is nevertheless critical: A lawsuit filed by anti-abortion activists in Texas requesting an injunction that would bar distribution of the abortion pill. They claim that the FDA was too speedy in approving the pills, and are seeking to ban mifepristone.

Most courts would throw this case out. Mifepristone has been on the market for some 20 years. There are no legitimate safety concerns — it’s overwhelmingly safe (safer than penicillin), and frankly has a much better safety record than many, many drugs that have secured FDA approval. In fact, both mifepristone and misoprostol, drugs that are typically used in combination for medication abortion in the US, are by any fair account significantly over-regulated simply because they are used in abortions.

This case should be a nonissue. Except the judge they’re in front of is a radical Trump appointee. And he has the power to pull abortion pills from doctors’ hands.

This is all, obviously, very bad. What strikes me in reading the lawsuit, though, is what a shocking pile of lies it is. And look: This isn’t surprising. The anti-abortion movement has relied on lies and deception at every turn, from falsely claiming that abortion causes breast cancer when it doesn’t to passing laws requiring doctors in some conservative states to read from scripts that lie to women before those women can end a pregnancy. Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which routinely imitate abortion clinics, lie to get women in the door and then keep lying once women are inside — they often advertise abortion services they don’t provide; they dress their staff up in medical gear to suggest that they’re doctors when they aren’t; they perform ultrasounds that they aren’t trained to read or interpret; and they make promises to care for women and their children that they can’t and don’t intend keep. They’re so reliant on deception that when some liberal states tried to pass laws that basically said “businesses have to actually offer what they’re advertising and they can’t lie to people,” Crisis Pregnancy Centers sued.

So this norm of just straight-up lying is pretty baked into the anti-abortion movement. But it’s nevertheless darkly fascinating to see them utilize it again in their crusade against abortion pills.

In their lawsuit, they refer to Mifepristone as a “chemical abortion drug,” which I suppose is supposed to sound scary until you remember that there’s really no such thing as a “non-chemical drug,” unless we’re talking about “natural” substances, and I don’t think the conservative movement is pushing particularly hard for FDA approval of weed, opium, or hallucinogenic mushrooms. Most of the drugs you get at the pharmacy or the doctor’s office are indeed made up of various chemical compounds. But this lawsuit was filed by a conservative group that assumes, perhaps not incorrectly, that the people reviewing it are both highly suggestible and extremely dumb.

The lawsuit claims that there is “substantial evidence” that these drugs harm women and girls. It claims that pregnancy is a natural and normal state that causes women no harm, and that “Following delivery, almost all women return to a normal routine without disability.” Their citation for that claim? The official journal of the Catholic Medical Association, which “explores issues at the interface of medicine and religion” and draws “from the rich tradition of Catholic bioethics.” In other words: A highly ideological publication. In reality, some 60,000 American women experience serious pregnancy-related complications every year. And significant majorities of women wind up living with pain and other physical tolls of pregnancy for years after:

One study of more than 1,200 women published January 2015 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology reported that 24 percent of women were still experiencing pain during sex a year and half after having a baby. Another study published last June in the journal PLoS One found that 77 percent of more than 1,500 mothers studied had persistent back pain a year after having their babies, and 49 percent had urinary incontinence. ("We did not expect it to be that many women," says Angela Vinturache, MD, PhD, one of the study’s authors.) These problems aren’t just results of vaginal births; a 2014 study of 1,115 mothers — about half who had cesarean sections, half who had vaginal births — found similar degrees of continuing pelvic pain regardless of how their baby was delivered. Last August, researchers from the University of Michigan likened childbirth to running a marathon — only before a marathon, you train — after giving 68 women MRIs seven weeks after birth. The MRIs showed that 29 percent of them had evidence of fractures they never even knew they had in their pubic bones, while 41 percent had undiagnosed tears in their pelvic floor muscles, which wrap around the vagina and anus. Childbirth is a well-studied traumatic experience for women’s bodies, yet modern medicine still leaves far too many mothers debilitated, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Only a deep misogynist could that think that it’s ok and “normal” for women to have painful sex, live in painful bodies, walk around with fractured pelvises, and regularly pee their pants just because they had a baby.

The lawsuit further claims that “the FDA’s approval of chemical abortion drugs has potentially serious and life-threatening effects on women and girls.” This should be a pretty easy claim to prove: Millions of women have used abortion pills, in the US and worldwide. If these pills were spectacularly deadly, we’d expect to see women and girls dying in significant numbers — you know, like they do from childbirth in the US.

But we don’t. As of 2018, after roughly two decades of abortion pills being legal in the US, the FDA reported that 24 women had died after taking mifepristone; 11 of those deaths were most likely related to other medication or causes. But even if we take that larger number — 24 deaths in 18 years — we are still talking about a mortality rate that is lower than any maternal mortality rate in any country anywhere in the world. More women die from preventable pregnancy-related deaths in Texas alone, where this lawsuit was filed, in a single year than have died nationwide from mifepristone since the year 2000.

For even greater context, 522 men died from Viagra in the first year the drug was on the market.

The mortality rate of mifepristone is .65 deaths for every 100,000 medication abortions — note the little dot before “.65,” as in, less than one. The mortality rate of pregnancy in the US is now 24 deaths for every 100,000 live births. It is 55 deaths for every 100,000 live births among Black women, and 108 deaths for every 100,000 live births among women 40 and over.

These numbers are, nearly across the board, higher in states that have banned abortion than in states that have not. According to an important recent study, mothers living in states that have banned abortion since the Court overturned Roe are three times more likely to die in pregnancy, during childbirth, or in the weeks after than mothers in states that have preserved abortion rights.

And the anti-abortion movement has the gall to claim mifepristone is the threat to women’s health?

Ok, so the argument at the heart of their lawsuit is a big lie. Why does it matter? Because it shows that they know they can’t win on the merits.

We all know why they want mifepristone banned, and it’s not because of safety concerns — if every drug with a worse safety record than mifepristone were banned, good luck getting much in the way of medical care. This isn’t about the anti-abortion movement’s sudden concern for women’s health. The anti-abortion movement wants to ban mifepristone because they don’t want women to have access to abortion. That’s it.

And fair enough — they are certainly entitled to believe abortion is morally wrong. But arguing over abortion on moral grounds alone is a losing battle for abortion opponents, and they know it. Most people, after all, can distinguish between a baby and this, a pregnancy at five weeks:

Anti-abortion activists can’t very well go to the courts and say, "yeah, this medication is overwhelmingly safe and has been in wide use with close to no serious consequences for two decades, but we just don’t like it, so please ban it.” So they tell lie after lie and invent pretext after pretext.

Pathetic? Yes. But dangerous? Also yes. And if we aren’t paying attention, we may all find ourselves governed according to threats invented by a band of lying misogynists who want to imprison abortion rights proponents and force women and children into pregnancies they don’t want or cannot physically sustain — cutting the lives of women and babies short and hollowing out our futures.

They could just tell the truth. But then they’d lose.

xx Jill