Abortion is the Real Threat to Women, Not Pro-Life Laws

In a recent MedPage Today article, Chloe Nazra warns that two proposed bills would “worsen pregnancy outcomes and increase intimate partner violence.” The title alone tells readers what follows: not a careful medical analysis, but a political prosecution dressed in a white coat.

Lee begins with the anguish of an abused woman, then uses that suffering to indict the entire pro-life movement. It is a powerful rhetorical maneuver, but it rests on a fantasy narrative: that abortion advocates protect women from violence while pro-life laws empower abusers.

The facts do not support that story, and neither does basic moral reason.

The author begins with a real horror: domestic violence. Every decent person should condemn it. Abusers terrorize women, manipulate children, and exploit pregnancy. Homicide during pregnancy and the postpartum period demands serious public action and research has identified homicide as a leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women in the United States.

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But then the article takes a hard turn from fact into fantasy. Nazra uses abused women as emotional cover for abortion ideology. She asks readers to believe that the pro-life movement, which exists to protect vulnerable human beings, somehow empowers violent men. That story does not follow from the facts. It follows from the author’s politics.

Yes, reproductive coercion exists. Yes, some abusers pressure women into pregnancy. Others pressure women into abortion. The pro-life answer to both evils remains the same: protect the woman, protect the child, punish the abuser.

Abortion does not reform a violent man. It does not build a safety plan. It does not provide housing, law enforcement, counseling, financial support, or custody protection. It ends the life of the child and sends the woman back into the same danger.

The author cites a study claiming “abortion restrictions” increased intimate partner violence (IPV) in “trigger-ban” states and produced major social costs. That study estimates associations and predicted costs, including at least 9,000 additional IPV incidents and more than $1.24 billion in projected social costs. But even if one accepts those unverifiable estimates, the conclusion does not prove that abortion protects women from abuse. It proves that women in violent relationships need serious protection. The author’s answer is abortion. A humane answer is to remove the threat, not the child.

Her treatment of Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fl.) is another exercise in narrative construction. Cammack endured a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. That condition cannot produce a living child, and treatment for ectopic pregnancy does not constitute an elective abortion. Even the reporting author acknowledges that Florida regulators said ectopic pregnancies are not abortions and fall outside the abortion restriction.

The problem in Cammack’s case came from confusion and fear. That calls for clearer guidance, not unrestricted abortion.

Then comes the Dilation and Evacuation claim. The author wants readers to picture miscarriage care under attack. But the Dismemberment Abortion Ban Act targets a specific abortion procedure that dismembers a living unborn child. Rep. Cammack’s own release says the bill does not target women for prosecution. A miscarriage has already taken a child’s life. A dismemberment abortion takes that life intentionally. The author collapses those two realities because the abortion argument needs the fog.

The North Carolina bill deserves precision, too. Reports say House Bill 1232 would recognize life from fertilization and classify abortion as murder, with language involving force to prevent abortion. Pro-life advocates can and should reject any reading of any law that would invite vigilante violence against women or doctors. No abuser has moral permission to imprison, beat, threaten, or kill a woman.

No clinic threat becomes “pro-life” because someone invokes the unborn child. The pro-life movement defends innocent life. It does not outsource justice to violent men.

That is why the author’s central accusation fails. She does not refute the pro-life position. She invents a monster and argues with it.

The unborn child remains the missing person in her essay. She asks whether a fertilized egg in a fallopian tube can be saved. In an ectopic pregnancy, no. Medicine must save the mother. But she then leaps from that tragic medical reality to defend abortion generally, including second-trimester procedures that tear unborn children apart. The ectopic pregnancy cannot justify the elective killing of children who are safely developing in the womb.

She asks whether miscarriage tissue should remain in a woman’s uterus. No. Doctors should treat miscarriage promptly. But miscarriage care does not require a legal regime that allows abortion for any reason. It requires clear law, good medical practice, and doctors willing to treat women according to both science and conscience.

She asks whom the pro-life movement protects. The answer has not changed: the mother and the child. The abused woman and the unborn baby. The frightened teenager and the child she carries. The woman with an ectopic pregnancy and the woman in crisis who needs help to choose life.

The article calls pro-life laws “cruel.” The real cruelty lies in telling a woman that her child’s death equals her freedom. The real fantasy says abortion heals abuse, solves poverty, clarifies medicine, and liberates women.

It does none of those things. It kills a child and leaves every deeper wound untouched.

Women deserve protection from violent men. Children deserve protection from lethal violence in the womb. A serious society can defend both. A serious movement must defend both. The author’s fantasy narrative cannot survive that simple truth.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.