President Joe Biden took a few moments of his second State of the Union address to advocate abortion, and invited a guest who was personally affected by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June.
Amanda Zurawski and her husband Josh were seated in first lady Jill Biden’s box during Biden’s speech Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress.
Zurawski is from Austin, Texas, where abortion now is illegal except to save the life of the mother. Last year, when she was 18 weeks pregnant, Zurawski’s water broke. Her doctor refused to provide medical intervention to remove the baby from Zurawski’s womb because of the Texas law banning abortion, The Texas Tribune reports.
Zurawski’s doctor sent her home and didn’t take action until she developed sepsis, a serious infection that can be deadly.
But Dr. Ingrid Skop, an OB-GYN and a senior fellow and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, told The Daily Signal that in Zurawski’s case, “it’s not the Texas law that’s at fault.”
“It’s the fact that the doctors didn’t understand the Texas law,” Skop said.
Skop says that “our immediate response should be compassion” after hearing Zurawski’s story. “I mean, she went through a horrible situation, but unfortunately, I think that her situation has been leveraged by those with a political agenda, which is unfortunate.”
The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists commented on Zurawski’s presence at Biden’s second State of the Union address in a formal statement Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, there are many abortion activists eager to exploit difficult situations like these and the people involved, in order to preserve the ability to kill preborn humans at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason,” the organization said.
Tragedies such as Zurawski’s will be averted through educating doctors on the law, Skop said, and “not to turn against the laws and then to allow nearly a million human lives to be destroyed every year for largely elective reasons.”
In October, the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount initiative reported that an estimated 10,000 babies were alive because of Roe v. Wade and abortion on demand being overturned by the Supreme Court.
“Our response should be to insist that medical organizations who are tasked with providing guidance to physicians should step up and do their job in the presence of new laws,” Skop said.
At one point during his speech, Biden said: “Congress must restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose.”
After practicing medicine in Texas for 30 years and delivering more than 5,000 babies, Skop said, she has not changed anything about the way she cares for her patients since the end of Roe v. Wade because Texas’ pro-life law still allows doctors to provide patients with lifesaving care.
Although Skop has read Texas’ new law, she said “a lot of doctors in Texas have not read the law” and instead have bought into a media narrative that doctors are not allowed to intervene when medical complications occur during pregnancy.
The Texas law provides exceptions to the ban on abortion when “a physician believes a medical emergency exists.”
“The law says that a doctor can use his reasonable medical judgment to determine when to intervene in a medical emergency,” Skop said.
In reality, this kind of lifesaving medical intervention can’t be defined as abortion, Skop said, because “abortion is defined as a procedure that has the intent of ending the fetal life.”
When the intent of medical intervention is to “protect the mother from a life-threatening condition,” it is not only legal, but necessary, the OB-GYN said.
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