The day the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center was announced in June of 2022, I was on a 24-hour shift at my hospital in Indiana, where I work as an obstetric hospitalist, serving women who have been admitted either for labor and delivery or due to pregnancy complications. As a pro-life OB-GYN, this timing felt symbolic. My views on abortion are shaped by my understanding that as an obstetrician, I have two patients—a pregnant mother and her baby—and that my job is to foster the health of both, rather than intentionally ending the life of one. What a gift it was to be caring for my preborn patients on the same day that the nation’s highest court overturned the ruling that has allowed their legal killing in all of the fifty states since 1973!

Within minutes of the news breaking, however, it became clear that not all my fellow physicians felt as celebratory as I did. My phone was bombarded with text messages from friends and colleagues frantically asking what this ruling would mean for their practice. Understanding that they might not think about abortion laws as often as I do, I was happy to answer their questions, even the ones whose answers seemed obvious (“Will I be allowed to treat ectopic pregnancies?” Yes, of course!). I assumed any widespread confusion on the part of physicians would quickly be cleared up nationwide. However, three years later, uncertainty and fear about practicing medicine under prolife laws persist within the medical community.

This confusion is intentional. For the last three years, abortion advocates have relied on a multi-pronged rhetorical strategy designed to inflict unfounded fear in the American public about post-Dobbs pro-life laws and push them towards supporting their extreme, zero-restrictions abortion agenda. Three primary tactics have defined pro-abortion attacks on pro-life laws: abortion harm denial, preborn erasure, and ban-blaming. Unfortunately, major medical groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have been at the forefront of these efforts—to the detriment of the physicians they claim to represent and the patients we are sworn to serve.

These organizations’ ideologically motivated dishonesty reveals the need for a life-affirming change in our nation’s medical culture.

Denying Abortion’s Harms

Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, abortion advocates argued that pro-life laws incentivize abortion-determined women to undergo dangerous “back-alley” and self-managed abortions. But in the era of Dobbs, leading pro-abortion organizations are explicitly directing their followers and allies not to use rhetoric such as coat hanger imagery. Today, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s website lists “coat hanger images” as an example of “language and symbols to avoid.”¹

What changed?

One important explanation lies in the development of the abortion pill mifepristone. Approved by the FDA in 2000 as part of a two-drug protocol to induce an abortion, mifepristone was originally placed under strict regulations to protect women from its life-threatening potential side effects: retained tissue, hemorrhage, and sepsis, to name the most concerning ones. But between 2016 and 2021, the FDA completely eroded these essential safeguards. As a result, these drugs can now be ordered online without so much as an in-person evaluation to confirm how far along a woman is in her pregnancy and to ensure the pregnancy is in her uterus (and not an ectopic pregnancy, which occurs in 1 in 50 pregnancies) before she undergoes a painful and potentially dangerous abortion—often by herself.²  

But the abortion industry is determined to push the narrative that this drug is completely safe. Because, according to the latest report by the Guttmacher Institute, drug-induced abortion constitutes nearly two-thirds of all abortions, and mail-order, do-it-yourself abortion represents 14 percent.³

In short, although abortion proponents’ primary argument against pre-Roe pro-life laws was that they led to dangerous self-managed abortions, today’s abortion proponents refrain from warning women about the risks of managing their own abortions, because the abortion industry increasingly relies on self-management through mifepristone.

Drug-induced abortion is not, in fact, perfectly safe. It has four times the risk of complications of surgical abortion,⁴ and without an ultrasound scan, medical professionals cannot adequately rule out risk factors for the drug’s most serious potential complications—retained pregnancy tissue, hemorrhage, sepsis, and missed ectopic pregnancy. Recent analyses of insurance claims data in the U.S. show that nearly 1 in 9 women who take the abortion pills will experience a serious complication.⁵

But pro-abortion medical groups dismiss these risks. In 2023, a dozen major medical organizations, including ACOG, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in which they stated that mifepristone is as safe as “common painkillers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, which more than 30 million Americans take in any given day.”⁶ As one paper lays out, this oft-repeated activist talking point so lacks “specific, controlled, and head-to-head evidence” that it violates the legal guidelines set for pharmaceutical marketing about drug safety communications, meaning that “if such an assertion was attributable to the manufacturer, it would precipitate a reprimand by the FDA.”⁷

This isn’t the only egregiously false claim that ACOG has promoted. In one statement, it contends that “the greatest risk of harm related to selfmanaged abortion for patients is the risk of criminalization.”⁸ In fact, not a single pro-life law in the books prosecutes women for obtaining abortions.

Nevertheless, ACOG’s guidelines for clinicians on caring for patients who undergo self-managed abortions mentions no other risk of this practice but “criminalization.”⁹ The words “hemorrhage,” “infection,” and even “bleeding” are nowhere to be found in this document.

This silence speaks volumes about ACOG’s priorities. In doing so, ACOG joins the list of other medical associations that have thrown aside basic principles of patient care to follow the cultural winds (take, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ harmful and unscientific position on gender intervention¹⁰). Because of their political commitments, leading medical authorities are ignoring sound science and medical ethics to deny the harms to women of induced abortion.

Erasing the Preborn

Of course, the party that’s most harmed by induced abortion is the preborn child whose life is taken by it. Abortion advocates deny this negative impact, too, by taking pains to avoid acknowledging the child’s humanity. This largely comes in the form of language policing. For example, ACOG’s Guide to Language and Abortion objects to the use of several pregnancy-related terms, claiming they are medically inaccurate.¹¹But a closer look at the disfavored words themselves—and ACOG’s preferred replacements—suggests that their motive for these efforts to alter our lexicon is driven by politics rather than actual science.

Under its list of “terms to avoid,” the Guide includes “preborn child” and “unborn child,” arguing that “centering the language on a future state of a pregnancy is medically inaccurate” and instead suggesting “embryo” or “fetus.” However, in another document on caring for families who have experienced a stillbirth, they give the following guidance on language to use: “Communication with bereaved parents should be clear and honest. The term ‘your baby or babies’ should be used in conversations; terms such as fetus, embryo or spontaneous abortion should be avoided.”¹² Why the inconsistency? Does scientific reality hinge on the wantedness of a child?

ACOG also advises against describing cardiac activity, which is detectable on ultrasound at six weeks’ gestation, as a “heartbeat,” arguing that the cardiac organ doesn’t develop its four chambers until later and therefore doesn’t count as a heart in early pregnancy. But organs aren’t defined by their fully developed form. If they were, we’d say humans don’t have brains until well into adulthood. They’re defined by their function—in this case, pumping blood through the organism’s body, which the embryonic heart performs starting around five weeks gestation.

This illogical formalism isn’t about good medical care. To the contrary, communicating with patients well requires using language that they can understand—not just regurgitating complex medical terms. The goal of this semantic gymnastics is clear: to replace colloquial but perfectly accurate language describing preborn babies with cold, clinical medical jargon to deliberately skate over the scientific fact of the child’s humanity.

The Society of Radiologists admits as much in its recently published Lexicon for First-Trimester Ultrasound, in which it advises against describing an embryo as “live” or “living.”¹³ Unlike ACOG, the Society doesn’t even pretend that its reasoning isn’t political, stating that it objects to this language on the grounds that it “may be appropriated by people outside of the field of medicine to support political rhetoric and prescriptive legislation.”

The dehumanization of children in the womb by abortion proponents is nothing new, but it is disappointing to see the medical professional organizations that physicians like me are supposed to trust join in on these dishonest games. Since medical school, I have been taught that obstetricians should be committed to caring for two patients. Erasing my second patient goes against the foundational principles of my vocation.

“Blame the Bans”

Another key pro-abortion tactic has proven successful in scaring the American public about pro-life laws: ban-blaming.

In early 2025, ACOG launched a video campaign featuring the fictional case of a patient suffering pregnancy complications.¹⁴ The video closes with the slogan “blame the bans”—which perfectly summarizes abortion advocates’ dishonest approach to changing public opinion about abortion laws.

Their approach is simple: Publicize stories of women in pro-life states suffering traumatic experiences related to pregnancy, then blame those tragedies on abortion laws. Some of these stories may have occurred due to some physicians’ confusion about when they can intervene to treat pregnancy complications—but instead of calling for better guidance to reassure physicians that they can, in fact, offer excellent emergency care under pro-life laws, abortion advocates stoke the confusion and then point fingers at the laws for causing it. This narrative continues even after state officials have explicitly clarified that physicians can treat pregnant women in a timely manner,¹⁵ and despite the fact that not a single physician in the country has been charged with violating abortion laws for providing emergency obstetric care.

Often, abortion advocates attribute negative outcomes to abortion laws without any concrete evidence of a connection between the two except that the cases occurred in pro-life states. They completely ignore other potential causes of maternal morbidity and mortality, including plain and simple medical neglect—which, let’s not forget, occurs in every state. Weaknesses in our nation’s maternal healthcare system have negatively impacted pregnant women across the country for decades, especially low-income mothers and those living in maternity care deserts. But under Dobbs, the only determining factor for maternal outcomes that abortion advocates see is abortion laws.

By its own admission, ACOG’s goal in ban-blaming is not to call for better legal guidance for physicians, even though one report found that many legal departments of hospitals in pro-life states have a dire need for improvement in the support they offer their medical staff. Rather, they openly state that their motive is political. In one statement, ACOG asserts that “no edit, no amendment, no addendum” to pro-life laws can satisfy them. It wants nothing less than for these laws to be “repealed,” legalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason.¹⁶

In pursuing its agenda, ACOG is willing to sacrifice physicians’ practices and women’s health.

The Impact on Doctors and Patients

The rhetorical games that pro-abortion medical organizations are playing have a material impact on patient care. Three years after my phone was bombarded with text messages from colleagues wondering what the newly released Dobbs decision would mean for them, I am dismayed at the confusion that remains among some of my fellow physicians about how to practice medicine under pro-life laws.¹⁷

Some of the uncertainty stems from an unacceptable lack of guidance from hospital legal departments or state medical boards—though this is improving. After my own state of Indiana’s pro-life law went into effect, my hospital gave us straightforward instructions about how our new law would impact our practice: Aside from a few new paperwork requirements, we could care for patients in the exact same way we did before. Unfortunately, not all doctors have been offered this support. As late as December 2024, a report published by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden found that many physicians experience a “lack of communication” from their hospitals’ leadership, leading to “inaccurate interpretations” of pro-life laws.¹⁸ One Texas OB-GYN stated that she has seen “doctors telling patients they can’t treat an ectopic pregnancy, which is not true.”

This confusion and misinformation are also directly harming our patients through misdirection. Abortion proponents’ monomaniacal focus on pinning mothers’ negative health outcomes on pro-life laws causes them to ignore the complex and overlapping factors that contribute to our nation’s maternal mortality crisis. For example, abortion advocates have blamed rural maternity ward closures in states like Idaho on their abortion laws, but the decline in rural hospitals’ labor and delivery services has been an issue for at least a decade, impacting even states with extremely permissive abortion laws like California, which has seen 21 percent of its maternity units close since 2014.¹⁹

Similarly, ban-blaming ignores the important role that poverty and medical neglect play in determining pregnant mothers’ health outcomes. For example, in its article on Yeni Alvarez-Glick, who passed away in Texas during her third trimester from complications related to hypertension, The New Yorker reports that she was unable to afford the insulin she was prescribed and sometimes skipped doses of her blood pressure medication so that its side effects didn’t interfere with her job. It also notes that she was prematurely discharged from the ICU prior to her death.²⁰ Glossing over these factors in favor of blaming Texas’s heartbeat law paints a false picture of this tragic case and distracts from the issues that our nation must address to prevent future deaths like Yeni’s. Furthermore, as author Leah Libresco Sargeant states, “framing her case as the fault of an abortion ban presumes that abortion is the escape clause for bad medical care.”²¹

Across the country, another result of pro-abortion false narratives is the terror some women and their partners feel that they won’t be able to obtain treatment for pregnancy complications. This misguided fear can have deadly ramifications.

One New York Times report features the profile of a Texas couple that identified as “pro-life,” yet heartbreakingly opted to order abortion drugs online when the wife became pregnant. They told the Times that this was because she suffered from endometriosis, and “they worried that Texas’ abortion ban made hospitals so afraid that if she miscarried or had pregnancy complications, doctors would have to wait to intervene until her condition became life-threatening.²² In fact, the Texas Supreme Court and the state’s Medical Board have both explicitly stated that physicians can quickly treat pregnant women suffering potentially life-threatening complications.²³ False beliefs to the contrary can be corrected by ensuring that the physician workforce is well educated about their state laws.

Another victim of misinformation about pro-life laws is Candi Miller, the 41-year-old Georgia wife and mother who passed away from complications during an attempted self-managed abortion.²⁴ According to her family, Candi similarly feared that her state’s abortion law would prevent her medical team from treating her should her several pre-existing health conditions pose a serious risk during her pregnancy. She also believed two abortion-harm-denying narratives: one, that do-it-yourself abortion is safe; and two, that she could “get jail time” for getting “caught trying to do anything to get rid of the baby,” as her son put it. Organizations like ACOG have repeated both of these myths, which may have ultimately cost Candi her life, as she was too scared of prosecution to seek medical aid when she needed it.

As someone who has devoted her career to serving both pregnant women and preborn babies, I find it unacceptable that the medical organizations I should rely on to support my practice are sacrificing my patients to the interests of the abortion industry.

Transforming the Culture of Medicine

In an era where the nation’s leading medical organizations prioritize a proabortion agenda over the health of our patients, one thing is clear: It’s time for a new path forward in medicine.

Pro-life medical organizations are filling in the gaps where “mainstream” groups are abandoning patients for politics. Pregnancy help centers are on the frontlines of meeting women with unplanned pregnancies where they are. With approximately 2,750 centers across the country, pregnancy centers served nearly 1 million women in 2022, providing over 500,000 free ultrasounds so they could see the humanity of their preborn children.²⁵ Many also provide medical services such as well woman exams and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs)—all in a life-affirming, supportive, and compassionate environment. Contrast this to the “care” provided by Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, which are outnumbered 5 to 1 by pregnancy centers, and are singularly focused on providing one thing to pregnant women—abortion.

Faith-based medical associations like the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA), among others, advocate for the lives of both patients as well as helping support their members. Additionally, however, there is a need for a second medical opinion on the issue of abortion to counter the false pro-abortion narrative put forth by the other major medical associations. The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), of which I proudly serve as CEO, has been that second medical opinion since 1973. We are promoting clarity over confusion through medical education—including educating physicians on state abortion laws. Our online course “Practicing Obstetrics in States with Abortion Regulations” aims to empower physicians to confidently serve their patients with the excellent and often lifesaving care they deserve.²⁶ Through our advocacy arm, AAPLOG Action, we are working with policymakers in pro-life states to ensure that education like this is available to all medical professionals. By putting a stop to the deliberate confusion that the abortion industry has sown in pro-life states, we hope to ensure that women get the care they need and that our nation can fully address systemic weaknesses in our healthcare system without distractions. Through its educational content, AAPLOG is fighting back against the dishonest minimization of abortion drugs’ serious harms to women and the language games that serve to obscure the humanity of our preborn patients.

And through its member programs and services, AAPLOG is investing in our nearly 8,000 life-affirming medical professional members, including medical students and residents, who constitute the next generation of medicine.

For millennia, the medical profession has been grounded in the principles of the Hippocratic Oath. As this sacred statement of ethics has been neglected, practices that deliberately harm our patients have crept into medicine, eroding its very purpose—health, healing, and wholeness. In this postDobbs era, there has never been a more important moment for life-affirming medical organizations like AAPLOG. As pro-life voices for the medical profession, we are poised to restore sanity to a culture gone astray. And, as medical voices for the pro-life movement, we are also well-equipped to offer evidence-based education for advocates working to make life-affirming cultural change.

Now is the time for pro-life advocates to mobilize behind medical professionals. The future of our nation’s healthcare, as well as the well-being of pregnant women and their preborn children, depend on it.

NOTES

1. Planned Parenthood Action Fund. (n.d.). Protest tips: It’s our fight, let’s do it right | rightfully ours. Planned Parenthood Action. https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/rightfully-ours/bans-offour-bodies/protest-tips-lets-do-it-right

2. American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (n.d.). Just the Facts Sheet: Chemical Abortion. AAPLOG. https://aaplog.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230728-Chem-AbOne-Pager.pdf

3. Maddow-Zimet, I., & Forouzan, K. (2025, June 24). Stability in the number of abortions from 2023 to 2024 in US states without total bans masks major shifts in access. Guttmacher Institute. https://www.guttmacher.org/report/stability-number-abortions-2023-2024-us-states-without-totalbans-masks-major-shifts-access

4. Niinimäki M., Pouta A, Bloigu A., Gissler M., Hemminki E., Suhonen S., Heikinheimo O. Immediate complications after medical compared with surgical termination of pregnancy. Obstet Gynecol. 2009 Oct;114(4):795-804. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0b013e3181b5ccf9. PMID: 19888037.

5. New Research Reveals Undisclosed Dangers of Chemical Abortion. Foundation for the Restoration of America. (2025, May 2). https://www.ffroa.com/chemical-abortion-research/

6. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. US Food and Drug Administration, Court Listener (US District Court for the Northern District of Texas February 10, 2023). Retrieved from https://storage. courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.370067/gov.uscourts.txnd.370067.91.1.pdf.

7. Louttit C. The Origins and Proliferation of Unfounded Comparisons Regarding the Safety of Mifepristone. BioTech. 2025; 14(2):39. https://doi.org/10.3390/biotech14020039

8. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (n.d.). ACOG releases new recommendations for clinicians about self-managed abortion. ACOG. https://www.acog.org/news/ news-releases/2024/11/acog-releases-new-recommendations-for-clinicians-about-self-managedabortion

9. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (n.d.). ACOG releases new recommendations for clinicians about self-managed abortion. ACOG. https://www.acog.org/news/ news-releases/2024/11/acog-releases-new-recommendations-for-clinicians-about-self-managedabortion

10. Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, Committee on Adolescence, Section on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health and Wellness (Michael Yogman, Rebecca Baum, Thresia B. Gambon, Arthur Lavin, Gerri Mattson, Lawrence Sagin Wissow, Cora Breuner, Elizabeth M. Alderman, Laura K. Grubb, Makia E. Powers, Krishna Upadhya, Stephenie B. Wallace, Lynn Hunt, Anne Teresa Gearhart, Christopher Harris, Kathryn Melland Lowe, Chadwick Taylor Rodgers, Ilana Michelle Sherer, Jason Rafferty); Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents. Pediatrics October 2018; 142 (4): e20182162. 10.1542/peds.2018-2162

11. ACOG Guide to language and Abortion. ACOG. (n.d.-a). https://www.acog.org/contact/mediacenter/abortion-language-guide

12. Management of stillbirth. ACOG. (n.d.-d). https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/ obstetric-care-consensus/articles/2020/03/management-of-stillbirth

13. A Lexicon for First-Trimester US: Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound Consensus Conference Recommendations, Shuchi K. Rodgers, Mindy M. Horrow, Peter M. Doubilet, Mary C. Frates, Anne Kennedy, Rochelle Andreotti, Kristyn Brandi, Laura Detti, Sarah K. Horvath, Aya Kamaya, Atsuko Koyama, Penelope Chun Lema, Katherine E. Maturen, Tara Morgan, Sarah G. Običan, Kristen Olinger, Roya Sohaey, Suneeta Senapati, and Lori M. Strachowski, Radiology 2024 312:2.

14. Abortion bans prevent clinicians from providing care. ACOG. (n.d.-a). https://www.acog.org/ news/news-articles/2025/1/abortion-bans-prevent-clinicians-from-providing-care

15. TMB provides clarification on rules regarding exceptions to . . . Texas Medical Board. (n.d.). https://www.tmb.state.tx.us/dl/57121A93-FA13-5E39-F2B2-DFC51BCA2EFD, YouTube. (n.d.). Medical Education & Guidance. South Dakota Department of Health. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=vrYxPkSzTTw; AAPLOG, X. https://x.com/aaplog/ status/1839780781255692742

16. “Abortion bans are to blame, not doctors.” ACOG. (n.d.-a). https://www.acog.org/news/newsreleases/2024/10/acog-abortion-bans-are-to-blame-not-doctors

17. Hauschildt, K. E., Kumar, A. J., Viglianti, E. M., Vranas, K. C., Bernstein, T., Moroz, L., Iwashyna, T. J., & Critical Care-Obstetrics United for Research and Advocacy for Gender Equity (COURAGE) Group (2025). US Physicians’ Perceived Impacts of Abortion Bans in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Chest, S0012-3692(25)00300-9. Advance online publication. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.chest.2025.03.008

18. Practicing Amid “A Minefield”: Emergency Reproductive Healthcare Under Dobbs. A Senate Finance Committee Staff Report. https://legacy.www.documentcloud.org/documents/25463495senate-committee-report-on-emergency-reproductive-health-care-post-dobbs

19. Southwick, R. (2025, April 17). Many California hospitals have closed maternity units, and more are at risk. OncLive. https://www.chiefhealthcareexecutive.com/view/many-california-hospitalshave-closed-maternity-units-and-more-are-at-risk

20. Taladrid, S. (2024, January 8). Did an abortion ban cost a young Texas woman her life?. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/abortion-high-risk-pregnancy-yeni-glick

21. Libresco Sargeant, L. (2025, January 27). Pro-life laws didn’t kill these women. Commonplace. https://commonplace.org/2025/01/27/pro-life-laws-didnt-kill-these-women/

22. A day with one abortion pill prescriber The New York Times. (n.d.). https://www.nytimes. com/2025/06/09/health/a-day-with-one-abortion-pill-prescriber.html

23. TMB provides clarification on rules regarding exceptions to Texas Medical Board. (n.d.). https://www.tmb.state.tx.us/dl/57121A93-FA13-5E39-F2B2-DFC51BCA2EFD, Texas v Zurawski (Texas Supreme Court February 21, 2024). Retrieved from https://aaplog.org/wp-content/ uploads/2025/01/2024.02.21-TX-v.-Zurawski-AHM-and-CLI.pdf.

24. Surana, K. (2024, September 18). Candi Miller died afraid to seek care amid Georgia’s abortion ban. ProPublica. https://www-propublica-org.translate.goog/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban-deathgeorgia?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=es&_x_tr_hl=es&_x_tr_pto=tc

25. Pregnancy center reports. Lozier Institute. (2025, January 9). https://lozierinstitute.org/pcr/

26. Medical education. AAPLOG Medical Education. (n.d.). https://meded.aaplog.org/