Recently, doctors with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) issued a video review of a U.S. Senate hearing on abortion. AAPLOG’s Communications Manager Myriam Diallo interviewed Dr. Christina Francis and Dr. Susan Bane to offer their thoughts on the hearing, including correcting medical misinformation by abortion activists in attendance.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing favoring the abortion industry in early June titled, The Assault on Women’s Freedoms: How Abortion Bans Have Created a Health Care Nightmare Across America. Four of the six invited witnesses were activists for the abortion industry. Dr. Francis, along with The Abortion Survivors Network founder Melissa Ohden, attended as witnesses for the pro-life perspective.
Francis explained that witnesses were given the opportunity to make a 5-minute statement, but “you don’t get to speak again unless a senator asks you.”
The AAPLOG video offered an opportunity to get “more time” to “clarify some lies and misinformation that were told during that hearing,” Francis said.
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While the title of the hearing contained the word “nightmare,” abortion activists repeated at least 10 times that “fear” has ensued in the medical industry following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson ruling which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Dr. Allison Linton, a chief medical officer with Planned Parenthood, lamented during her testimony that since the Dobbs decision, she and her “colleagues have been existing in a state of chaos, confusion, and fear.”
The assertion was based on the error that induced abortion is often “necessary” to save a mother’s life.
For this reason, Linton claimed, doctors who support abortion have a fear of not being able to provide care for patients. She described several situations, such as patients with breast cancer or at risk of stroke as examples of why induced abortion was “necessary.” At one point, Linton queried that in the wake of Dobbs whether a patient would have to wait until an actual stroke occurs.
However, such situations described by the abortion activists were misleading.
These arguments make it “sound like now that they don’t have induced abortion to go to, that they’re like, ‘what on earth are we supposed to do?’ Francis observed.
“The 7,000-plus members that we represent, as well as many others across the country who have never done induced abortion as part of their practice, we know exactly what to do in those situations,” Francis said. “We take care of our patients.”
Francis added:
“[T]here’s a lot of breast cancer treatments, actually, that are available now for women who are pregnancy where they can continue their pregnancies. But also, that all of these state laws that they were decrying actually allow, fully allow, for physicians to intervene immediately if a woman is facing a potentially life-threatening complication of her pregnancy. … I don’t know where this sense of chaos is coming for them. I don’t know if they truly don’t know how to take care of patients without induced abortion in these situations.”
Bane explained the confusion underlying the term “abortion.”
“An induced abortion is defined by the Center for Disease Controls, the CDC, as an intervention with the intention to terminate a suspected or ongoing pregnancy… [the] intention is to produce a dead baby,” Bane said.
This contrasts with what doctors faithful to the Hippocratic Oath do.
“When we take care of a patient who has premature rupture of membranes, we’re not intending by separating our maternal and fetal patient to end the life of our fetal patient,” Bane explained. “That may be an unintended consequence, but we’re going to try to save the life of both of those patients if we can. … so, I was really taken aback that they don’t understand some very basic definitions.”
In opening remarks to the Senate committee hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders advanced an abortion talking point that excludes the fetal patient—that abortion is about women being able “to control their own body.”
He then deferred chairmanship of the committee to a female senator because “given the subject matter, I think it’s appropriate for a woman to chair this important hearing.”
Bane observed the absurdity of Sanders’ claim:
“[H]e basically removed men, removed fathers, removed family from the conversation. Granted it is a woman’s issue, but it’s also a family issue, and it’s an issue for men too. … I’m the medical director at four pregnancy centers. I see patients every day that I’m there with unplanned pregnancies. And it is a men’s issue. … That made me sad that that was the Democrats’ perspective on families.”
Tweet This: A video from AAPLOG clarified some pro-abortion lies and misinformation shared at a Senate committee hearing.
During the hearing, a pro-abortion doctor, Nisha Verma, called abortion pill reversal (APR) “misinformation,” claiming she had been part of a study on APR that had to be stopped because study subjects were having significant bleeding, were at risk, and thus it is not a safe treatment.
During the AAPLOG review interview, Francis corrected Verma’s misinformation.
“She made the outrageous claim, when she was supposed to be telling the truth to a Congressional hearing, that the study was stopped early because abortion pill reversal was so dangerous for women,” Francis said. “This was so egregious to me, and it took everything in me not to get out of my seat honestly at that point, to correct the record.”
“What she was knowingly hiding was that the study was stopped early because women who had received placebo ended up in the emergency room with life-threatening hemorrhage, had to have emergency surgery, one of whom had to have a blood transfusion,” Francis explained.
“The women who actually got progesterone, which is the abortion pill reversal therapy—yes, one went to the emergency room, but she was just found to be completing her abortion, required no treatment whatsoever and was sent home,” said Francis. “And so, actually, the study that she was claiming shows that APR was not effective and is dangerous actually showed that APR was effective.”
The study at issue is the discredited Creinin study, in which abortion doctor Mitchell Creinin set out to debunk the APR protocol but ultimately demonstrated its effectiveness when the study, which was cut short, backfired.
“Twice as many women in the progesterone group had ongoing pregnancies at two weeks as the women who received placebo,” Francis said. “And it was the woman who had received mifepristone [the first dose in the abortion pill regimen] and not progesterone that actually had the adverse outcomes, and that’s why the study was stopped early.”
“Any physician who has learned even the basics of how to read a study would be able to pull that from the data presented in that study,” she said. “So that was a really egregious lie.”
To date, statistics show there have been over 5,000 lives saved and counting with the APR protocol. Progesterone has been used since the 1950s to treat miscarriages. Bioidentical progesterone and has been FDA approved since 1998 and in other forms since 1974.
Additional videos featuring AAPLOG’s pro-life medical experts can be found HERE.
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network (APRN) and Pregnancy Help News. Heartbeat us currently a party in two lawsuits brought by two state Attorneys General concerning promotion of the APR protocol.
