Regardless of whether you agree with her politics — as a freshman member of “the Squad,” it’s somewhere between Jeremy Corbyn and Josef Stalin — congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri has an eminently admirable personal story. She survived a horrific alleged rape and homelessness only to become a nurse, a minister, and now a member of Congress. But perhaps most incredible is her story of motherhood, which she testified about in the House Oversight Committee to advocate for better black maternal care.
Every day, Black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic.
I testified about my experience @OversightDems today.
Hear us. Believe us. Because for so long, nobody has. pic.twitter.com/rExrMXzsSQ
— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) May 6, 2021
If you can excuse the cringe-worthy social justice jargon, it’s a harrowing and heroic story worth listening to in its entirety. But most interesting is how Bush, herself a pro-choice radical, inadvertently makes a very good case for a 20-week abortion ban.
At 23 weeks, Bush’s first son was born just 1 pound, 3 ounces after her doctor ignored her assertions that something was wrong with the pregnancy.
“We were told he had a 0% chance at life,” Bush says. Fortunately for Bush and her son, the chief of neonatal surgery happened to be in the hospital that day and decided to take that chance. Her son ultimately survived after over a year in the hospital.
During Bush’s second pregnancy, she had similar complaints. At 16 weeks, she again discovered she was in preterm labor.
“The doctor told me that the baby was going to abort,” Bush said. (In medical parlance, “spontaneous abortion” means a miscarriage, not an induced abortion.)
“Just go home,” she claims the doctor said when she asked him to save the baby. “Let it abort. You can get pregnant again because that’s what you people do.”
Luckily, once again, Bush found another doctor to save her baby with a cervical stitch. Bush’s daughter, like her son, is alive today as a consequence.
Bush’s stories are obvious examples of how too many doctors ignore the warnings of expectant mothers. And as the slur of “you people” demonstrates in the second story, how many doctors are completely dismissive of black lives, especially the black unborn.
But these are also appeals to the value of human life. Even while drowning under the medical bills and stress of her son’s recovery, Bush fought to have the doctors save a baby that could easily be aborted in most states. If Bush’s unborn babies mattered, then so do the lives of others.
As medicine continues to advance, the point of fetal viability will extend earlier and earlier. Decades ago, being born at 23 weeks of gestation was a death sentence. Now, they have a 20% to 30% chance of survival. It’s not impossible that one day, a baby born at 16 weeks could survive.
Although people in the United States generally support very early-term abortions, even as they profess personal moral reservations about it, the overwhelming majority opposes any elective abortion after the 12th week of gestation. Only a quarter of the public supports legal second-trimester abortion, and just 13% supports legal third-trimester abortion.
A 2013 Huffington Post poll found that 3 in 5 people support a 20-week abortion ban, with a mere 2 in 5 opposed. A Quinnipiac poll found the same distribution among women in particular.
It’s impossible to expect the party that supports the right to abortion to abandon all forms of abortion advocacy suddenly. But a 20-week abortion ban is popular, responsible, right, and perhaps the true national consensus. By her personal experience as a mother, congresswoman Bush should know that better than anyone.
