Legacy media outlets in Texas and progressives from California cosplaying as journalists continue their efforts to replace reality with fiction.
Yesterday, the Houston Chronicle reported that the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee will release limited mortality data from 2022 and 2023 as it works to catch up on reporting.
The article cited multiple deaths and claimed they could have been avoided if abortions had been provided. All of the cases appear to be clear-cut instances of medical malpractice, but the paper, citing the work of ProPublica, insists on misleading readers to score political points.
One of the cases cited by the Chronicle was that of Porsha Ngumezi.
At 11 weeks pregnant, Ngumezi miscarried and was bleeding profusely. The bleeding was so extreme that she needed multiple blood transfusions. She was having difficulty clearing the miscarriage remains from her uterus by natural means.
Ngumezi should probably have been given a D&C procedure, but instead, she was given the medication misoprostol, which is often used to induce abortion, and left to bleed out.
ProPublica, which has a history of distastefully transforming tragic malpractice deaths into misshapen shivs against Texas’ pro-life laws, suggested that Ngumezi’s doctor was afraid to perform a D&C procedure.
According to Secular Pro-Life (SPL), ProPublica’s narrative that this situation occurred because doctors were afraid of abortion laws is “incoherent for several reasons.”
First, doctors in Texas are allowed to use D&C procedures during miscarriages—and there’s no gray area in the law. In fact, the law is explicit on this point, stating that removing embryonic or fetal remains is not an abortion.
ProPublica’s article never cites this specific portion of the law. Maybe they didn’t bother to read it, or perhaps they did but chose not to disclose it before misleading Ngumezi’s grieving husband in order to get quotes from him.
That a D&C wasn’t performed on Porsha Ngumezi was medical malpractice and had nothing to do with Texas’ abortion law. Also, it’s important to note that no doctor in Texas has been prosecuted for performing this procedure since the state’s abortion ban went into effect.
That’s also not mentioned by ProPublica.
What’s even more perplexing about ProPublica’s reasoning is that the law is unequivocal about the means of abortion—it applies to both medications and surgical interventions.
SPL points out that the abortion-inducing drug given to Ngumezi was “no more or less an abortion than doing a D&C.” This quickly throws into question the idea that the doctor was so terrified to do an abortion that he administered a drug which is often used in abortions.
This latest shameless story comes on the heels of 60 Minutes insisting, without evidence, that Texas doctors are undertrained in maternal-fetal medicine.
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