California goes for a golden opportunity to double down on the culture of death
(National Review) Insane. Evil. Total waste of taxpayer money. These are some of the things that come to mind when I think about The People of the State of California v. Heartbeat International & RealOptions.
There were closing arguments in the endless-feeling trial. The attorney general of California believes it’s a priority to shut down any talk of abortion-pill reversal. Most Americans — maybe even most pro-lifers — probably don’t even know what that is. That’s for a mix of reasons. For one thing, it’s not a dramatic treatment. It’s progesterone. Progesterone is just about the most natural thing in the world when it comes to pregnancy (and even, in the biological life of a woman).
So what is abortion-pill reversal, or APR? If you have taken mifepristone, the first pill in the standard abortion-pill cocktail, it is possible to take progesterone and stop the impact of the mifepristone. Mifepristone blocks progesterone, making the uterus inhospitable to the unborn child. So adding progesterone can undo the mifepristone and save the life of the baby. It’s not guaranteed. The sooner after taking mifepristone the better. But if you were just pressured — or forced — to start a chemical abortion, this is a last option that might possibly save the life of your baby.
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The chief madness of this lawsuit that California has brought against Heartbeat and RealOptions Obria is that it’s pretty much a miracle if you happen to have just taken the first pill and happen to know you might have a way out of the abortion still.
I’ve seen a girl walk out of a Planned Parenthood, beside herself that she just took that first pill, find herself in a conversation with a sidewalk counselor, and wind up on the phone — in one situation I’m thinking of, with two Sisters of Life who immediately lined up a doctor to help with a reversal. In that case, the girl’s mother — who had insisted on abortion — later took the phone away from the girl.
The pregnant 17-year-old had left the clinic to go pick up her brother from daycare — otherwise she seemed interested in going straight to meet the Sisters and get a breather from the pressure cooker of her life and this terrifying moment that she wasn’t allowed by her mother to tell her boyfriend about.
“He’d love to be a father,” she said. She wanted life for this child, even though the pregnancy wasn’t planned.
In the end, she never got the reversal. But there was another pregnancy, as there often is, and she went to the same Planned Parenthood. She was further along, and pills were not an option. Someone by the grace of God described the surgical abortion procedure to her and mentioned the point at which the heartbeat would stop. She immediately got the courage to leave. She was having none of that. She reconnected with that sidewalk counselor and then the Sisters. She’s raising that baby now.
In that case, knowledge of reversal actually was never even made use of, but it still wound up being lifegiving down the line.
The story I mentioned was from New York, but it could have easily been California.
The Golden State believes one of its priorities is to make sure that women aren’t even told about abortion pill reversal. And that’s not because millions of abortions are being reversed by APR. It’s because the ideology of abortion is about the right to a dead baby.
Tweet This: The Golden State believes one of its priorities is to make sure that women aren’t even told about abortion pill reversal.
That’s why there have to be “born alive” bills. Because if the culture of death had its way, the baby who survives a failed abortion would be left to die. A former governor of the State of Virginia, a pediatric medical doctor, in fact talked about this reality in an infamous interview, thinking there was nothing controversial about what he was saying. That’s not where most reasonable people want our doctors to be. It suggests “do not harm” is gone.
Medicine is not just a vocation. It’s a business. And it’s been overcome with this ideology that does not value all life — only the lives that are most convenient.
I was listening in on some of the arguments on Thursday in the case against Heartbeat, and the poor people following me on X were subject to essentially me yelling at the Zoom window.
They’ve tried to make it a pernicious threat to women that there is even a hotline — Heartbeat calls this the “helpline” — for women and girls who have taken that first abortion pill and would like to give reversing it a try.
And here I thought we were supposed to believe abortion advocates like California Attorney General Rob Bonta were for choices.
The attorney for the state on Thursday of course kept referring to “APR” — conveniently, you don’t even have to remind people that we are talking about the most intimate violence of abortion. I don’t know, but APR could sound like one of the groceries stores we had in New York when I was a kid (A&P), or something having to do with mortgage rates. Nope, it’s helping a mother with the only option left when the developing baby within her is about to unnecessarily die.
California doesn’t want her to have that last potential chance for life. Gotta have another dead baby.
It drives me mad because we don’t tell women about all kinds of dangers and complications when it comes to abortion, contraception, and assisted reproductive technologies. But California doesn’t want the relatively small likely population that might access abortion pill reversal to know it’s an option.
That’s not women’s health care or freedom or choice — silencing all knowledge of the option.
Of course, what this is really about is the larger project of demonizing pro-life resources for pregnant women — because abortion is an industry, after all, that does rely on dead babies. And the less information and more euphemisms the better for the profits to be made.
I don’t how this case is going to shake out. But it’s certainly not a good sign that most of the country hasn’t even noticed it’s happening.
If you would like more information on the case, go here. And that helpline that saves the occasional life or more is here.
Editor's note: Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the religion editor of National Review. Sign up for her weekly newsletter The Lifeline here. She is the author of A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living. This article was published by National Review Online and is reprinted with permission. Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network (APRN) and Pregnancy Help News. Heartbeat is currently the subject of two lawsuits brought by state attorneys general concerning sharing information about Abortion Pill Reversal.
