A few weeks ago, Jessa Duggar Seewald posted an emotional YouTube video revealing her latest pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. It is a heart-wrenching video of a mom grieving the loss of her baby and questioning if the loss could have been prevented.
“Was it something on my part that I did or did not do?” Duggar Seewald asks.
And the story could have ended there, just like it probably would have for others in the public eye - with universally predictable condolences to a woman mourning the loss of her child.
And there were those types of sentiments.
But pro-abortion advocates and media outlets also saw it as an opportunity to tell a different story, to rewrite Duggar Seewald’s story for the public.
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People.com initially published a story titled, “Jessa Duggar Reveals She Had a Miscarriage: ‘I Just Immediately Started Crying.’”
Then, just two days later posted another story: “Jessa Duggar Says She Had a D&C, How Does That Differ From Other Abortions?” stating Jessa “decided to check in to a hospital to perform a dilation and curettage procedure (D&C) abortion procedure to remove the fetus from her womb.”
Jezebel.com posted its take on Duggar Seewald’s video with a story titled: “Jessa Duggar Seewald Had an Abortion, Even If She Won’t Say the Word.”
Parade.com, originally reported the story online titled this way: Jessa Duggar Reveals She Had a Life-Saving Abortion in Emotional New Video (later changing the title to read: “Jessa Duggar Reveals She Had a Miscarriage in Emotional New Video”).
The stories piled on, with multiple sites posting the misleading version of Duggar Seewald’s experience under this title: “Jessa Duggar Details Life-Saving Abortion in Emotional Video” as seen HERE, HERE, and HERE.
And just like that, famously pro-life Duggar Seewald’s post-miscarriage D&C story was socially reconstructed as an abortion story.
And it didn’t stop there.
There was also the Twitter storm.
The public backlash was intense, with posts insisting Duggar Seewald had an abortion, as seen HERE and HERE, with one tweet even dishonestly asserting Duggar Seewald “had an illegal abortion.”
The comments centered on a procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C).
A D&C is a procedure to remove tissue from inside the uterus.
According to Mayo Clinic, healthcare providers perform dilation and curettage to diagnose and treat certain uterine conditions (like heavy bleeding) or to clear the uterine lining “after a miscarriage or abortion.”
Miscarriage and abortion are two different reasons for needing a D&C.
To be clear, Duggar Seewald is clear - she had a D&C. That part is true.
But many of the stories written around that truth were not true.
She went back to YouTube to clarify what pro-abortion advocates were misconstruing.
“The ultrasound revealed that I had a missed miscarriage. My baby’s heart had stopped beating 3 weeks before I had a D&C,” Duggar Seewald pinned in the comments section of her YouTube page.
Equating a non-elective miscarriage with an abortion because both end with a D&C is like equating a graveside burial service with burying someone alive.
Both have the same final actions.
Digging a hole in the earth. Same. Lowering the body into the earth. Same. Covering the hole with dirt. Same.
The final step may look the same – but you can’t just look at it only from the end.
The status of the person being buried matters. A lot.
Burying a dead person is the proper way to dispose of a deceased body; burying a living person is murder.
Likewise, we understand that the status of the baby in the beginning matters for both abortions and miscarriages. It is the baby’s status in the beginning that defines everything that comes afterward.
So, why rewrite the truth? Why were abortion advocates and media outlets eager to pile on and call Duggar Seewald’s post-miscarriage procedure, “an abortion?”
Christa Brown, Senior Director of Medical Impact with Heartbeat International offers this answer:
“This intentional confusion is being perpetuated by big abortion and some media. True healthcare professionals are not confused about the difference in miscarriage and abortion. Any attempt to blur the lines is to push forward a political agenda, not to provide healthcare for women.”
Tweet This: True healthcare professionals are not confused about the difference in miscarriage and abortion.
Additional reports indicate that promoting the deceptive labeling of a miscarriage is not isolated to this instance.
Abortion advocates are also encouraging women to lie and say they are experiencing a natural miscarriage rather than a chemical abortion if they need to seek medical care during a self-managed abortion.
Abortion advocates may be treating terms like “abortion” and “miscarriage” as nuanced terminology that can be easily interchanged to serve the purpose at hand, but blurring the lines doesn’t change the facts. And the facts are not confusing.
“The difference in abortion and miscarriage,” Brown adds, “is clear and conclusive. Abortion purposefully ends the life of a child. Miscarriage involves the premature death of a child.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t that abortion advocates are confused; perhaps the problem is that they are willing to lie to serve their pro-abortion narrative, even if women (and babies) are hurt in the process.
