A prominent national pro-life group says it is clearing up the Biden administration’s “pro-abortion myths” ahead of the president’s State of the Union address this week.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said Wednesday that the Biden administration uses “fearmongering tactics” to push an agenda of “painful, late-term abortions nationwide.”
The group is also releasing a new ad accusing the Biden administration of lying about state abortion bans endangering women’s health.
“Joe Biden is lying. State laws protecting unborn children allow doctors to act during a medical emergency,” the ad says. “While Biden briefly talks about abortion in his address, there will be thousands of pregnancy resource centers caring for women, providing health care, education, housing, and job assistance.”
President Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Thursday.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision reversing Roe vs. Wade, doctors were afraid of the new state abortion bans, and mainstream medical organizations, which tend to favor abortion, “refused to provide guidance,” according to Dr. Ingrid Skop, M.D., the director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of SBA Pro-Life America.
“It’s important to realize that even prior to Dobbs 90% or more of obstetricians did not do elective abortion,” Skop told reporters during a call Wednesday.
“Most of the hospitals that we practice in are Catholic, Methodist, Baptist. Those hospitals do not do elective abortions, and yet doctors always knew if there was a life-threatening emergency how they could intervene,” Skop said.
Meanwhile, abortion advocates have “backed the president into a corner,” forcing him to share the “egregious and extreme” policy position of second and third-trimester abortions, Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs at SBA Pro-Life America said during Wednesday’s call.
“But they know the American people don’t support that extreme policy position and so they’re having to use tragedies to advance their political agenda,” Billy said.
First Lady Jill Biden plans to bring Kate Cox, a woman who left Texas to get an abortion, as her guest to the State of the Union.
Cox, 31, made headlines in December when she was denied an abortion in Texas for her unborn baby with a fetal anomaly and left to obtain the abortion out of state. Cox was more than 20 weeks pregnant with a baby who had a condition called trisomy 18, which involves having an extra chromosome 18 and can cause abnormalities like heart defects.
Cox’s legal team had argued that continuing the pregnancy threatened Cox’s future fertility.
However, in December the Texas Supreme Court decided against Cox, ruling that she was not entitled to a medical exception abortion under the state’s abortion ban.
Texas law allows for abortions only when a pregnancy seriously threatens the life of the woman or carries “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
About 95% of trisomy 18 pregnancies result in a miscarriage. However, some babies do survive past birth and can live into their toddler years, teen years, or even longer. A woman believed to be one of the oldest people with the condition lived to 40.
The Biden administration and his reelection campaign have placed abortion front and center as the election cycle heats up.
In January, the Biden campaign debuted a new ad titled “Forced,” which features another Texas woman who obtained an abortion out of state.
Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas OBGYN and mother of three, left Texas to obtain an abortion for her unborn baby with anencephaly, a condition where a baby is born without parts of the brain and skull.
Dennard is one of several women suing Texas to clarify the “medical emergency” exception to the state’s abortion ban.
In her court testimony, Dennard acknowledged that her pregnancy had not made her “critically ill.”
“I was not hemorrhaging, I was not septic. I was pregnant with a lethal anomaly, and I did not believe that I would be able to receive an abortion in my state at that time for the sole purpose of my lethal anomaly,” Dennard said.