For a supposedly scholarly article in the annals of the most respected medical group on the planet, a recent entry in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics is far more revealing about ethics — or lack thereof — than medicine.
What the article, “Why Crisis Pregnancy Centers Are Legal but Unethical,” reveals is just the latest example of the self-proclaimed medical establishment’s all-out advocacy of abortion, a “treatment” that always takes the life of at least one patient.
Published in the March 2018 edition of AMA’s Journal of Ethics, the article takes aim at pro-life pregnancy centers just in time for oral arguments March 20 at the U.S. Supreme Court in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, which challenges a 2015 California law forcing pro-life centers to advertise abortions.
While abortionists’ 50-percent survival rate may be acceptable in the darkened halls of a Planned Parenthood near you, it’s rather striking to see a publication with AMA’s stature flinging arrows at the nation’s 2,750 life-affirming pregnancy help centers and ultrasound-equipped medical clinics that empower women to make the healthiest choice in an unexpected pregnancy, and which in many cases give mothers and their infants material and moral support after birth.
Penned by University of North Carolina so-called “Family Planning” professors Amy G. Bryant and Jonas J. Swartz, the piece rehearses decades-old and unproven talking points from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, both of which lose money from their bottom line every time a woman walks into the doors of a pregnancy center.
Most strikingly, the authors assert that the very existence of pregnancy centers represents an ethical dilemma that must be solved. After all, the staff and volunteers at the centers believe that abortion is the unnecessary, even unethical, killing of an innocent child. What could be more dangerous than believing an unborn baby is a child worthy of protection? Or, that a woman may in fact have better options than to end her child’s life through abortion?
Bryant and Swartz lay out four fundamental medical ethical principles, “beneficence, nonmalfeasance, respect for autonomy, and justice,” and proclaim with sweeping authority that pregnancy centers fail on all four counts.
Without bothering to provide a single instance to back up any of their claims — par for the course in attacks on pregnancy centers — Bryant and Swartz go so far as to say that it’s abortion businesses, not pro-life pregnancy help nonprofits, that live up to the ethical guidelines for the four principles stemming from the Hippocratic Oath’s “do no harm” promise.
That would be news to women like Katrina, whose boyfriend shuttled her off to an abortion business near Orlando in early 2017. The minute she walked into the clinic, Katrina knew she was making the mistake of her lifetime. “It was an eerie, chilling feeling once I walked in,” she said. “I just felt completely lifeless.”
Disregarding her misgivings, the abortion clinic staff gave Katrina a dose of mifepristone, the first of two pills in the chemical abortion pill regimen known as RU-486 or euphemistically as “medication abortion.” Katrina, as so many women before her, found out firsthand that abortion clinics care not one iota for notions like “beneficence, nonmalfeasance, respect for autonomy, and justice.” But, amazingly, Katrina got a second chance just 24 hours later at the life-saving pregnancy center right next door.
Today, Katrina is a college graduate and a happy mother who’s also pursuing a career in business — not because of the abortion clinic, but because of the pregnancy center next door to it. Even though her story contains more than just a little bit of the miraculous, her experience does point to larger trends. While 99 percent of women who visited a pregnancy center gave high marks to the center for its staff, volunteers, information and ongoing help, the photo negative is true of highly profitable abortion mills like Planned Parenthood.
Just last year, over 1.5 million women and men visited a local pregnancy center in the U.S., according to Heartbeat International’s 2018 LifeTrends Report—far more than the 926,190 abortions last reported by the Guttmacher Institute.
Perhaps that’s why abortion advocates are calling upon friends in high places at the AMA to back their failing, lethal agenda.
