When a woman goes through a full term pregnancy and then she
breastfeeds afterwards, her body converts the majority of her
breast tissue into a very cancer resistant type of tissue.
Which is why we see that the more pregnancies a woman has and
the longer she spends breastfeeding, the lower her
risk of breast cancers. Is it true that a woman's body
changes with a pregnancy and after delivery?
100%. But why is that a bad thing?
And pregnancy is not a problem to be solved.
It's not a disease to be treated.
If we truly cared about Women's Health and saving women and
taking care of them as quickly as possible, we do deliveries.
We don't do abortions and every doctor knows that.
That's the thing. Oftentimes families, women are
manipulated into that decision because they're told your baby
is suffering and you don't want your baby to be in pain.
That baby is not suffering inside of a mom.
There is no evidence whatsoever. There was a study recently that
showed that women who have children into their 40s are more
likely to live much longer into their 90s.
Is this true? Yes.
The bottom line is we weren't meant to do pregnancy or birth
alone. This is women's superpower.
What if everything that you've been told about pregnancy is
wrong? Today, Doctor Christina Francis,
an OBGYN who has delivered babies from rural Kenya and
fought for moms across America, is here to flip the script.
From the hidden superpowers of the pregnant brain to the real
dangers of abortion pills being mailed to your doorstep, to why
pregnancy doesn't break a woman's body but actually builds
it, this conversation will challenge everything our culture
thinks it knows about the female body.
If you're not already following us, hit that subscribe button on
YouTube and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast
app and join us over on Sub Stack through the links in the
description. Welcome back to the Lila Roe
show. Doctor Christina Francis,
welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.
It's so wonderful to be here. Doctor Francis, you're an OBGYN
who has devoted her life caring for mothers and babies, whether
it's in rural Kenya or here in the United States.
What are some of the most surprising things about
pregnancy that most people may not know, but that they should
know? I think what gets lost in our
current cultural narrative that just makes women so fearful of
pregnancy. And certainly since the Dobbs
decision, I think the the overriding cultural narrative
has been pregnancy is extremely dangerous.
There's all these complications. That's why we need abortion
laws. You know, this is kind of become
the the prevailing narrative. And certainly as an WBGYN who
now works exclusively in the hospital, so I'm managing high
risk pregnancies. I'm very aware that there are
complications that happen during pregnancy.
But thankfully those are the exception.
They're not the rule. And I think that's what people
need to understand the rule or the the most common experience
is that pregnancy actually greatly benefits women and
motherhood as well. Not just from the fact that at
the end of it, hopefully mom gets to take home this amazing,
beautiful little baby, but also it has ramifications, good
ramifications for her health long term.
So it decreases cancer risk. It can decrease the risk of
autoimmune disorders. We know that women who are
pregnant, but then also women who mother not through
pregnancy. So adoptive moms actually tend
to have longer life spans, lower rates of depression and anxiety.
And so there are long term health benefits to women that
most most women don't know about.
They're not talked about in their doctor's offices, which I
think is a real travesty. All right.
I'm so excited to unpack all of this because you don't typically
hear what you're speaking to about the advantages or the
positive, the benefits of pregnancy and of parenting.
Quite frankly, we hear a lot about the negative today.
So I'm excited to have you set the record straight here with
your work, your expertise and this new campaign that you're
running. Think pregnancy.
So first of all, the term pregnancy brain.
I remember being pregnant for the first time and you know,
people saying, oh, pregnancy brain.
It's when you forget, you're forgetful or you just feel
overloaded or whatever it is. But there's a lot that happens
in the brain during pregnancy, and it actually is an upgrade.
Yes. Can you share how it's an
upgrade? Yes, pregnancy.
Brain, yes, absolutely. It's really amazing under the
influences of many of the hormones that increase in a
woman's body during pregnancy. So estrogen, progesterone, even
oxytocin, those actually are inducing changes, permanent
changes in a woman's brain that are leading to that experience
of pregnancy brain during the pregnancy, but that are actually
restructuring her brain so that she can be a mom, so that she
can take care of her child and actually will have long term
benefits for her. So it's something called
neuroplasticity. So it's actually the neural
connections within a woman's brain are changing under the
influences of those hormones so that she can be more empathetic.
I mean, think about it. I know you have young children.
You know, if your brain had it changed during your pregnancy in
order to make you more empathetic, it would be much
harder to get up with your baby in the middle of the night when
you're sleep deprived, you know, and things like that.
So those structural changes that are happening are making it
possible for a mom to be able to bond with her baby better, to be
more empathetic, which of course then that changes her outlook on
life, you know, permanently. Women become more empathetic
after they become mothers, not just because they have that
bonding with their child, but because of those structural
changes that their brain has gone through.
Also, it makes women better able to multitask.
You know, I think any woman that's a mother knows that their
ability to multitask expanded exponentially once children were
introduced. And the interesting thing is
then that actually has benefits if if that mom decides to go
back into the workplace outside of the home.
Studies have actually shown that mothers actually make better
managers out in the workplace because of that ability to
multitask. So, so those are just a couple
of the the benefits of that, that changing that restructuring
of a woman's brain during pregnancy.
And that's why she gets that pregnancy brain because there's
a lot going on up there during pregnancy.
But again, I think if women can understand there's a reason for
all of this and it actually is benefiting me long term, then
hopefully that can make that part of pregnancy a little bit
easier to tolerate. It's so encouraging what you're
saying and I relate to it so deeply because I feel like since
becoming a mother I have gotten better in most categories.
I don't want to say every because it sounds very
braggadocious or whatever, but I feel like my children have
blessed me with the gift of more patience.
Yes, better multitasking, prioritization.
Like the things that don't matter as much don't matter as
much. If I could rewind 10 years or it
would be 7 years before we had our first child, who's now 6.
And I know I'm a better woman today and I credit God's grace,
my husband's patient leadership, and my beautiful kids with that.
And what you're describing are just some examples of it.
What are some other ways that a woman's relationship to her body
change? It change because of pregnancy
and child's birth. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I think this is a really important thing to talk about
because one of the things that is used to make women fearful
about having children is your body is going to change and it's
going to change permanently and it's going to be different and
you should be fearful of that. Is it true that a woman's body
changes with a pregnancy and after delivery 100% and it
changes permanently, You know, it doesn't go back to the body
that it was before pregnancy, But why is that a bad thing?
And I think that's what we need to talk about and reframe for
women. It's not a bad thing.
I think part of it is we can never fully understand what
things are going to be like if we haven't experienced it yet.
And so part of it is it has to be a little bit of a reflection
back that women look back and say, yeah, things are different
for me. But man, as you just said,
they're so much better. And I could have never imagined
that they were going to be this much better, even through the
hard times and things like that. So yes, a woman's body goes
through changes. And you know, some of those may
be a little bit challenging after a pregnancy and a
delivery, but so many of them are going to be better.
So one of the things is a woman's breast tissue goes
through changes as she continues through a pregnancy and then
hopefully as she breastfeeds. It's one of the reasons why
breastfeeding is so important, not only because it has benefits
for baby, but also because when a woman goes through a full term
pregnancy and then she breastfeeds afterwards, her body
converts the majority of her breast tissue into a very cancer
resistant type of tissue. Which is why we see that the
more pregnancies a woman has and the longer she spends
breastfeeding, the lower her risk of breast cancer.
So that's just one way in which a woman's body changes, but it
benefits her long term physically and, and her long
term health. And it's manifest, you know,
just to kind of highlight how maybe an annoying pregnancy
symptom actually means that you're going to have these
health benefits. It manifests itself in the fact
that women have a lot of breast tenderness early in their
pregnancy because they're multiplying that breast tissue
to get ready to breastfeed a baby.
So that might may seem annoying or troublesome in the beginning.
But again, if we can help women understand, no actually this is
a good thing and it's going to give you long term health
benefits, then hopefully that'll help her understand that change
a little bit better and, and feel good actually when her body
is going through those changes. How does breastfeeding and also
the changes during pregnancy help protect women not just from
breast cancer like you're talking about, but also uterine
and ovarian cancer? Yeah, absolutely.
So we know that even just with one pregnancy, a woman reduces
her risk pretty significantly of both ovarian and uterine
cancers. But we also see additional risk
reduction with each additional pregnancy.
There's a couple different reasons for that.
One, especially for ovarian cancer, is that we see the
highest risk in women who basically their ovaries are
working around the clock for longer periods of time.
So women that start having periods at a younger age don't
go through menopause until a later age and have no
pregnancies. That means that their ovaries
are working constantly for all of those years.
So those are women that we see some of the highest risk of
ovarian cancer in. People need to understand that
because then you can understand why pregnancy would provide a
protective benefit because essentially during pregnancy,
your ovaries kind of quiet down and shut down for the duration
of the pregnancy and and then at least initially during
breastfeeding as well. And so that that quieting down
of the ovaries is what can lead then to a risk reduction in
ovarian cancer. The other thing is those
hormones that come from the ovaries play a role in the
development of uterine cancer, but also when you're not having
an overgrowth of the lining of the uterus, which of course
you're not during a pregnancy and then during breastfeeding,
that reduces your risk of uterine cancer.
So those are just some of the health benefits of of pregnancy.
And of course, you are well aware in our current culture,
many women are delaying childbearing for a variety of
reasons. They're pursuing careers.
They're thinking, I have plenty of time to get pregnant.
Not only does that impact their their fertility rate and they
may not be able to get pregnant if they wait too long to start
trying, but also they don't get this risk reduction in their
cancer risk that they would have gotten had they had pregnancy
earlier. I do think there's in addition,
the flip side of what you're saying, though, is fear.
Fear around not just having a baby in your 20s, but for those
women who might get later, fear about having children later
because they say, oh, now you're a geriatric pregnancy, you are
now at higher risk. And so it's actually not good
for you to have babies into your 40s.
What would you say to that? Yeah, absolutely.
And I totally agree with you that and I, if I could change
there's a few medical terms that if I could take them out of our,
our lexicon as physicians, I would and one of them is
geriatric. I think that's one of the most.
You are geriatric. Terms.
Exactly. Exactly.
Another baby. I'm a geriatric.
You are a geriatric pregnancy, that's right.
I think that's such an awful term to use.
You know, we do know that there are some health risks associated
with pregnancy that do increase in in absolute incidents after
the age of 35. But like many things, I think
that risk oftentimes is overblown.
And you're right. And then women feel very fearful
to even try to get pregnant at that they.
Say it's too dangerous. I mean, I've actually heard
women say I don't want to have kids in my 40s because it's too
dangerous. Right, right.
Absolutely. And is there risk involved?
Yes, just like there is with anything.
But we can mitigate those risks oftentimes through, you know,
lifestyle interventions or if a woman has a chronic medical
condition, if we're treated being that and get it under
control well before she becomes pregnant or early in the
pregnancy, we can mitigate a lot of those risks.
And so I think it is definitely this narrative that a lot of
women buy and believe that they absolutely should not get
pregnant after the age of 35 because the risk would be so
high. Again, these are exceptions.
They are not the rule. The the rate of them does
increase slightly over what it would be if you're less than 35.
But I've had many, many patients who have had perfectly healthy
pregnancies and deliveries into their 40s.
I had one, even one time, I remember she came into my
office, she thought she wanted me to do labs because she
thought she'd probably gone into menopause.
She was 51. And it turned out she was
pregnant and she had a perfectly healthy pregnancy.
It was a total surprise, of course, in shock to her.
But yes, you know, those, again, those can be managed.
They can be managed well. And that's our job as physicians
is to partner with our patients and help them through those
times. But yes, I absolutely think that
we should be supporting women beyond 35 have perfectly healthy
pregnancies. I heard there was a study
recently that showed that women who have children into their 40s
are more likely to live much longer into their 90s.
Is this true? Yes, absolutely.
I saw the same study so and I think it speaks to the fact that
first of all, if a woman becomes pregnant at that stage in her
life, it is likely that she is has a little bit better just
sort of health status kind of going into it that her body is
able to get pregnant, which is wonderful.
But also, we know that pregnancy oftentimes serves as a motivator
to women for either stopping unhealthy behaviors or not
starting unhealthy behaviors. So I've had many patients who
were heavy smokers or maybe they were drinking a lot of alcohol
that when they or doing drugs that when they became pregnant,
because they now have this other person to think about and that
other person's health to take into consideration that actually
motivated them to stop that unhealthy behavior that maybe
they had tried to stop many times before and were unable to.
So we know that being pregnant, but also then being a mother and
having children to think about, you don't want to leave your
children without a mother. That also motivates many women
to healthier behavior, healthy, healthier choices.
And we just see in general as well that women who have
children tend to have a little bit longer lifespan.
And so I think that the study that came out recently that
showed, you know, women having children later on in life speaks
to exactly the opposite of this narrative that's out there, that
if women get pregnant after the age of 35, they're going to, I
think that there are women who legitimately feel they'll die if
they get pregnant after that age.
You know, and, and that's exactly the narrative that we
are trying to flip right now to say, again, not being, not
minimizing and not being ignorant of the fact that yes,
there are complications that can rise in pregnancy.
But thankfully, medical science has advanced so tremendously
that now there are so many conditions that we can treat in
pregnancy that we can still get good outcomes for mom and baby.
But remembering that those are the exception, they are not the
rule. The rule is that most
pregnancies actually go very well and confer health benefits
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Beyond the science, what in your view is the most beautiful or
awe inspiring thing about how a woman's body is designed for
pregnancy? Well, to answer that, I think I
have to tell you the story of how I would say my profession
chose me. I didn't choose my my profession
or my specialty of OBGYN. So I was a second year medical
student and hadn't even considered the field of OBGYN.
Actually was thinking about family medicine maybe.
And I was shadowing a family medicine physician and he got
called to the hospital to deliver one of his patients.
This was a woman I'd never even met before.
And so I went to the hospital with him and I was standing in
the back of the room watching the delivery.
And it was the first delivery that I I was in the room when
one of my sisters was born. But I was young and, you know,
so didn't watch the delivery. So it was the first delivery I'd
seen. And when the baby was born, I
just started crying. I thought it was the most
miraculous and beautiful thing that I had ever seen.
And this you're going to make me cry.
This older seasoned labor and delivery nurse.
She was back at the baby warmer, waiting to take the baby over to
the warmer. And she leaned over to me and
she whispered in my ear and she said, oh, honey, if this makes
you cry, you need to do this for a living.
And I've wished so many times since that I could find her and
tell her you changed the course of my life, which is that one
thing that you said to me, you know, And I think it was the
Lord speaking through her, obviously.
But, but I, I wanted to tell that story because for me, it
just encapsulates the awe and really the miraculous nature of
pregnancy and, and childbirth. And to see as you learn, as I
went through medical school and I learned about human
development and Embryology and you see the amazing intricacies
that happen, the amazing timing and coordination that has to
happen. I mean, honestly, when you learn
about it, you're like, how on earth does pregnancy even
happen? And things go right?
Because so many things have to go right, you know, for that
baby to develop how he or she is supposed to.
But of course, that's what happens in the vast majority of
cases. And then the first time you see
that baby on an ultrasound to see even at 6-8 weeks, I always,
I always refer to baby as peanut because they do in the
beginning, they look like, and I always say, look at your little
peanut in there. You know how he or she's moving
around and you see the heart beating it just.
And then you just see how mom's body grows and changes to
accommodate that in such amazing ways.
It, it just, I don't, I don't know how any OBGYN couldn't be
supportive of that. I don't have any OBGYN supports
elective abortion that intentionally destroys that life
that you just see the the beauty and the wonder of the
development of that life. And then as we see how women's
bodies accommodate and change and grow and to support that
baby is just really amazing. One of the things I love to talk
to patients about. And again, this is another
aspect of man. I know for pregnant women, it
feels awful. And then often times in the
third trimester and at the end of pregnancy when your hips hurt
and your pelvis just feels so heavy and it just everything
feels different and walking feels different and all of that.
And I know that it's hard, but what I tell him is this is
another sign that your body, without you having to tell it
what to do, your body is getting ready for that baby to come out.
And it's because a woman's body starts making a hormone called
relaxing, which does exactly what it sounds like.
It relaxes things. So our pelvises are typically
fixed joints. So they're, you know, multiple
bones. But the the joints aren't like
our hip joint that is meant to move.
Your pelvis is supposed to be very fixed.
But that would be a problem for childbirth because during
childbirth your pelvis needs to expand to allow that baby to
move through the pelvis and through the birth canal to be
able to be born. And so a woman's body makes a
hormone called relaxin that relaxes those pelvic joints.
Unfortunately, that doesn't just happen right at the moment of
childbirth. So it means that those those
joints get a little bit loosey goosey there towards the end of
pregnancy. But there's a reason for that.
It's because of the way women's bodies were made that they were
made to then start to change to accommodate that delivery, which
I just think is amazing. It is truly amazing.
Yeah, I I remember my husband when he saw me give birth for
the first time. So I got to hear it from his
eyes because I'm you're when you're in the experience, you
are in 1000%. You're not like what it looks.
Like, you know, you're like. You're in it so, but the actor
is like, what was it like? Because he's on the other end,
like watching the birth and he was like, it was the most I
don't remember the word. I know at one point he said it
was like almost like a sci-fi film.
Like does this really happening where my wife is able to bring
this life into the world? And he just talked about it
being like a flower. He was like he was just blown
away. He said it was the most
incredible thing he has ever witnessed in his whole life to
watch his son, our first be born and just the the majesty of this
little body, my body, like our bodies being able to do this,
bring another body into the world.
And then immediately he comes up, he tries to starts
breastfeeding. Like even that magic of like,
yes, God's design there. And it's just, it just gives you
a experience of awe. Yeah, one of my favorite things
actually is to watch the dads, you know, because most moms, I'm
not diminishing moms reactions at all, but most moms have
fairly similar reactions. You know, I mean, they're, like
you said, they're in the midst of it.
They are in it. It's this really intense
physical moment. Exactly.
And, you know, and then most moms burst into tears as soon as
the baby's out, you know. And so again, not diminishing
that because it is a beautiful reaction, but dads have really
different reactions. All of them do, though.
I love that you said that about your husband because, yeah, it's
just really neat to see. And especially with first
babies, to see that family unit sort of manifest itself for the
first time is really, really a special thing to be a part of.
So it sounds like you see you've seen a lot of different
reactions, probably everything from like just quiet awe to
tears to like super excited. Like what what?
I'm just curious like for the from your eyes looking at that
man. I love those videos too of the
woman walking down the aisle and the cameras on the.
Man, so you get to see him. Experience his ride coming down
the aisle for the first time and the only time.
But to see his baby being born. What what?
What do you see in the spectrum of men's reactions in that
delivery? Room yeah, Oh my goodness, such
a spectrum so you know from passing out which that has
happened many. Times and said it was like
intense you know like. Well, it does for me.
It's a. Different kind of intense for
you, but. We had dads pass out.
I always warned dads ahead of time.
Like, I've already taken care of two patients.
I don't need a third. So if you feel like you're
getting fat, please sit down. That's right.
So that happens sometimes there's something.
Yeah, exactly. But from that to just being
speechless to I've had dads now. One of my favorite things to do
actually, And I've done this especially with a lot, one of my
friends that I've delivered is to have dad gown and glove up
with me and help me do the delivery, which is really,
really cool. I love that.
But I've had dads who weren't gowned and gloved up with me who
like got so excited that they kind of tried to like be a part
of it or something, you know? So that's kind of fun.
Yeah. To just awe, being speechless,
crying, laughing, yeah. You know, jump on the couch like
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidnam. A great interview.
And I have to, like, try to climb on the bed with the mob,
you know, which is fine. But if I'm still, like, needing
to do things sometimes I'm like, all right, Dad, you gotta wait
just a minute, then we'll let you up there, you know?
So, yeah, it's just, it's really wonderful.
And. And I just love, you know,
again, just speaking to the importance of a family unit.
I just love when that is functioning how it is supposed
to function and, and I just wish that more people could see that,
I guess to see the importance of why should we as a culture be
encouraging and supporting formation of that family unit.
I mean, it just like I said, it makes such a difference even
just in how a woman does her labor.
You know, if she feels supported and has a really active,
supportive husband that is there with her.
In general, I would say that labor just goes so much
smoother. I mean, you know, there are
factors you can't control for obviously, but for the ones that
you can, it goes so much smoother.
Well, and I think in addition, you know, for those that maybe
there is an issue where their dad is not in the picture, which
tragically there are those cases, of course, but this brave
Mama is like, I'm going to just love on this baby.
In fact, for this baby. But then the power of community,
whether it's a mother, a sister, a doula, you know, a friend
doula, you in the room, you know, there to love on mom.
Because the bottom line is we weren't meant to do pregnancy or
birth alone. We meant to do it with the
tribe, with the community, you know, with the doctor, of
course, but you know, the friend or whoever it is.
So that's the power of accompanying moms, regardless of
the other challenges they may be facing or situations they may be
in, but accompanying them and being there with them, even
right up to the delivery of that baby to love on them and to
provide support. I remember for my very first
birth, my husband was, I was extra beloved on like I had my
husband there, I had my mother there, we had a doula there.
My sister dropped by for part of it.
Now she's actually a birth doula.
She went through training and it was just so special to have the
people that loved me there for me.
And so that's my hope for every woman.
And if anyone listening has someone in their life who needs
extra love, you know, who is pregnant or about to, you know,
give birth or whatever, showing up for them, you know, asking
how can I be there for you and showing up for them?
I think it's so important. Absolutely, absolutely.
And I think, you know, that's, I think even plays into this how
we're trying to kind of flip the narrative on how we look at
pregnancy as well, is even women that are in unplanned pregnancy
situations where they are facing maybe an uphill battle, you
know, by by society standards, they deserve to be excited about
this baby and they deserve to have that support.
And I absolutely, I mean, this is I think where the church can
really play an important and significant role for women that
maybe don't have that family support that they need.
We know that many women who choose abortion say that had
they had the support that they needed, they would have chosen
life for their baby. And so absolutely, this is a
place where Community Church can show up for women, be
supportive. I think it's so important to the
importance of having multiple generations within somebody's
life for an older grandmother to be able to normalize some of the
things that women are feeling during pregnancy, to say, no,
this is actually very normal. Again, it's a good thing because
it means that your body's changing in this way to help
support you, to help support your baby.
But they need to hear that. And that's, I think the
importance of having, you know, multiple generations around
them, whether that's through their family unit or through
their church. So, so important.
There's an article on rethinkpregnancy.com that is
called Pregnancy Doesn't Ruin Your Body, it strengthens it.
Yeah, you've shared a little bit about this, but can you share
how exactly does pregnancy make your body stronger?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we know that that women,
first of all, I mean, you said even from your own experience
with your first delivery, Yeah, it's like a marathon.
So it can actually increase a woman's cardiovascular strength.
We know that women who have full term pregnancies especially have
a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke later in
life. So it it can strengthen your
heart. Now, certainly there are, you
know, if women have heart conditions, they, they have to
be monitored during pregnancy. But again, we're talking about
in general, the rule here for pregnancy is that it can improve
your cardiovascular system. It also changes your muscle mass
and, and the structure of those muscles as well so that your
body can support pregnancy. And then what you need to do
after you deliver, you know, through motherhood as well.
And it, yeah, it just, it changes your, your pelvic
structure, makes that more stable as well.
So just lots of different ways that that women's bodies
actually, again, is are they going to be different?
Yes, they are going to be different after pregnancy and
delivery, but different doesn't mean bad.
It actually, yeah, improves women's their their stamina as
well. I know I've, I've heard
interviews with really elite runners who have said that
actually after having being pregnant and then delivering,
they actually have more stamina in long distance running, things
like that. So really amazing changes that a
woman's body goes through to then be able to, you know, not
only take care of her children, but that can impact her for the
long run as well. It's amazing.
I'm not a long distance runner or a short distance runner, but
I do relate to that because the stamina piece, I mean, I'm able
to do things I could never. I was like such a wimp before
having kids. I feel in many ways and I
remember after our first, having our first baby, I, I was like a
marathon. I like, I've never run a
marathon, but that was my marathon and I was overcome with
another again, awe. That is the word offer the baby,
offer the experience and awe that I was able by God's grace,
I had help, but I was able to do that, deliver this little 1 And
I was just like, wow, I can't I'm, I'm tougher.
I was like, Oh, I'm stronger than I thought I was, but my
body did it. You know, that's the other
thing. You have to be engaged mentally,
I think in pregnancy as a mom, but your body just knows what to
do if you let it. Absolutely, which is also this
incredible, almost surprise that it's so intuitive.
But at the same time, again, we're taught, I think, to fear
right pregnancy in our culture today.
So if you let your body do its thing, it's just amazing to
watch the power of the body. It is really amazing.
I mean, I, I tell people all the time.
I mean, obviously I'm, I'm not saying that my job is, is not
important or that I shouldn't be there as a physician.
But really my job in being there as a physician is to help a
woman if something isn't going quite right with her labor.
Because really and truly a woman's body does take over and
it knows what to do in labour and sometimes, yes, we have to
be there to assist with things if things aren't going quite as
they should. But it is really amazing to
watch that process and how, as you said, a woman's body changes
during pregnancy, but then even in the delivery process as well,
to be able to assist that that baby to be able to come out is,
is truly remarkable. Yeah.
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supposed to work together. And so we need to celebrate
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was meant to be, which is the sign of what I think women are
truly meant to be and to do. Not that you can't be a mother
and also work outside the home and work in the workplace.
Obviously, I'm a physician. I am fully supportive of women
being able to go to school and pursue their dreams, all of
that. But I think motherhood just
amplifies that. It doesn't.
It doesn't need to diminish from it.
But when we live in a society, in a culture that says you can't
do both, you need to be able to end your child's life in order
to pursue these other dreams, we really are doing women a
disservice through that. And we're not challenging.
The other thing that I say often times is that abortion is used
as a Band-Aid to try to cover up wounds within society or things
that are wrong within society. But we all know band aids don't
actually fix anything. They just kind of cover things
up and they're a temporary, you know, quote UN quote solution.
But one area that I think we need to be talking about more is
this area of prenatal diagnosis. I think it is one of the most
common situations of coerced abortions that exist.
And unfortunately, the coercion often times is coming from my
profession and I think a lot of doctors that are offering that
or maybe recommending it to women.
Honestly, it is coming from a place of misplaced compassion
because we are trained that the compassionate thing to do in
that situation. If that baby is not going to
survive anyways, which by the way, often times we don't
actually know that. But if we think that there's a
chance that baby isn't going to survive, then the compassionate
thing to do is why would you make that woman, you know,
endure an entire pregnancy? And this is how we're trained.
So I do think that many physicians think that they're
being compassionate when they offer that.
But what we think physicians need to understand is that our
words carry so much weight with our patients.
And when a doctor is saying that to you, many women see that as
their only option when it's the first thing that's offered to
them. Many women see that as, oh,
that's something that I have to do then.
And you're right, many times it comes at women and families over
and over and over again. I had the great privilege and
honor to meet an amazing woman at our State House in Indiana
when we were debating our abortion law.
And one of the big areas of debate was an exception for
babies that have potentially life limiting conditions.
And unfortunately, our law only got passed with that exception
in place. We fought very hard against it,
but this woman that I had the privilege of meeting had a baby
that was diagnosed with a condition called anencephaly
during her pregnancy, which is where the brain doesn't fully
develop. And, and typically, a lot of
times those babies will die before they're born.
But if not, they typically die shortly after birth.
Although there are documented cases of babies living to be two
or three years old even with that condition.
And abortion was not an option for her.
You know, that was offered to her by her first doctor.
She said no. She went back a couple more
times. At each visit, she said my
doctor explained the condition again to me.
It was like she thought that I was stupid or something and
didn't understand. She said I fully understood what
my in fact, I probably understood more about my
daughter's condition than my doctor did because I did so much
research. I was so motivated to do
research on it. So she eventually went to
another doctor because she was tired of having to fight that
fight every time she went to see her doctor.
She eventually went to six doctors before she finally found
one who was just willing to not pressure her to end her child's
life. She had a high risk doctor.
She wanted AC section because she wanted the best chance
possible for her daughter to be born alive.
And she knew, and she was correct through her research,
that labor would likely cause enough stress that it could end
her daughter's life during labor.
So she wanted AC section. First of all, ACOG, the American
College of OBGYN, says that if a woman just wants AC section for
any reason, just an elective C-section, that after counseling
her about the risk, we should do that for her.
So that's the official stance of ACOG.
She had a high risk doctor tell her that it would be a waste of
resources to do AC section for her since her daughter wasn't
going to live. How demeaning is that?
Now, thankfully, she finally found a Doctor Who said
absolutely, we'll do that. If that's your desire, we will
do that. And she delivered her daughter
Mia. Her story's available online.
It's it's a really moving story actually.
She delivered her daughter. Her daughter was born alive and
she was able to take her daughter home for three weeks.
She was able to breastfeed her, her son, I believe it was her
son that she already had at home, was able to spend time
with his little sister. And yes, they lost their
daughter after three weeks, but she said I wouldn't have given
up that three weeks for anything in the world.
And my son is a better, a better child.
He's going to be a better person because he had that three weeks
with his sister. They have beautiful videos of
her laughing, smiling. And, you know, it just breaks my
heart. I, I am so grateful for her that
she got to have that time with her daughter.
But it breaks my heart that she faced what she faced every time
she went into a doctor's office. And so I think it's really
important, as you said, that we not only be looking for ways
that, you know, eventually maybe there will be a way that we can
better support children with anencephaly and it and it won't
be an immediate death sentence as it kind of is now.
But even if not that, we find ways to respect families, to
support them, to help them understand.
We also know women's mental health outcomes when they have
abortions in those kind of circumstances with very wanted
desired pregnancies, typically farther along in the pregnancy
by the time these diagnosis are made, that their mental health
outcomes are actually significantly worse.
Who's talking to them about that?
But their mental health outcomes will be better if they're
supported through their pregnancy and through their
delivery. That's a huge point you just
made that I think most people do not know.
And it's so important that if you have a poor prenatal
diagnosis, life limiting condition, genetic condition,
something that says that death is imminent for this baby.
And then terminations offered that the mental health outcomes
for mom are worse if she aborts versus letting nature take its
course lovingly with as much medical intervention as you can
do to help that baby, give it, give that baby a shot.
If you let ultimately that baby have the lifespan ODD allows, as
opposed to cutting that lifespan short, the mental health
outcomes are going to be worse for mom with abortion than if
she chooses life for as long as that baby may live.
Absolutely. And there's a number of reasons
for that. You know, part of it is because
when the baby dies of natural causes that that happened
because of that condition, right?
So the parents didn't have any agency or, or participation in
that baby dying versus when the decision is made for a pregnancy
termination or an abortion, the parents then have agency in
that. And I think inherently they,
they feel that and they understand that.
The other thing is that often times families, women are
manipulated into that decision because they're told your baby
is suffering and you don't want your baby to be in pain.
This is heartbreaking to me that parents are being told, I mean,
how emotionally manipulative. Of course, no parent wants their
child to suffer or to ever feel pain if they don't don't have
to. And so I think so many families
who would never have considered abortion do it because they
think, well, I don't want my baby to be suffering.
That baby is not suffering inside of a mom because of any
genetic condition. There is no evidence whatsoever.
In fact, there's evidence that that the baby actually probably
feels, you know, somewhat less in inside than they maybe would
with the same condition outside. Not that they don't feel pain.
They do feel pain, but there that's a protected environment
and so it's helping protect them.
What will cause them pain would be to be intentionally
dismembered through an abortion procedure, and parents aren't
told about that, that that's going to be a very painful,
awful procedure for the baby. This is this is where we're
getting into it. And I think this is incredibly
important what you're about to share with people when we hear
the word termination. Like your average mom who has a
high risk pregnancy. Again, these are rare cases.
I shouldn't say average because these are very, you know, rare
cases, but there is this high risk situation where baby has
this very extreme condition, let's say, right?
First of all, that can be misdiagnosed.
We haven't even gone into that yet.
But for the question of pain, because they are told many women
in this Reddit forum I'm reading, they're saying they I
don't want baby to suffer. So I opted for termination,
right? And I'm sitting there like, do
you know what termination is, right?
Can you explain what termination means?
Yes, for a baby that has some genetic condition or life
limiting diagnosis. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so how it's done is going to depend on how far along in
pregnancy she is. But even if it's in the first
trimester, which, you know, the, the scientific literature now
shows that I think we can confidently say as early as 12
weeks, babies are feeling pain. But the literature actually says
it's likely earlier. Even when we see procedures that
are done as early as 8 or 10 weeks where the baby
accidentally gets kind of poked with a needle, the baby will
withdraw from from that. So that's evidence that the
baby's likely feeling pain even as early as 8 or 10 weeks.
But you know, in a first trimester abortion procedure, if
it's done via the abortion drugs that maybe is starved to death
and and starved of oxygen and nutrients.
So that's obviously not a pleasant way to to die.
If it's done through a surgical procedure, AD and C in the first
trimester, then the baby is being torn apart limb from limb.
It threw a suction cannula. So again that while the baby is
alive, so that baby is going to feel every bit of that.
And remember, baby is not suffering inside of mom
regardless of what condition he or she has.
There is zero evidence that exists that that baby is
actively suffering or feeling pain from that condition while
inside of mom, but we do know that these kind of dismemberment
procedures would cause pain. How could they I mean?
How could they not if? There's any feeling total
sensation, totally the feeling or sensation of being like when
I first learned about abortion and saw like just medically
accurate depictions of what these abortion I was, I was
floored. I thought people, are we just
living in La La land and pretending like this doesn't
happen, that termination involves these things, but like
keep going because a lot of these life, life limiting
diagnosis happen later or they're confirmed at the 20 week
scan as an example. That's when we're talking not
just first trimester abortions. We're talking 2nd and and even
third. Right, exactly.
So the farther along in pregnancy we get, then the
abortion procedures change a little bit in the second
trimester, at least up to depending.
Some people will do what's called AD and E procedure, which
is very barbaric procedure on a on a living baby where parts of
the baby are grasped with forceps that have teeth on them
that grab hold and don't let go. And literally arms are ripped
off, legs are ripped off, the torso is ripped off.
And again, this on a living baby that can very definitely feel
pain. Like they're crushing and
twisting, crushing, twisting. Like someone like God forbid
like grab me right and just tried to.
RIP my arm arm. Powerful like source?
Something like a machine? Right.
It's. Unreal.
And our families told this before when they're recommended
to have an abortion in this situation, I think in I can
confidently say in the vast majority of cases, no, they're
not. I think they're told it will be
painless. They're told that this is
actually going to not be. Suffering.
This is going to take away suffering, right?
And, you know, even no matter where somebody stands on the
issue of abortion, we should believe that if a family is
going to make a very significant decision like this, that they
should be making it with fully accurate information on both
sides, right? We don't just talk about risks
and benefits of one option. You have to talk about risks and
benefits of all options that you're presenting to a patient.
And part of that conversation, especially if you're centering
that conversation around trying to prevent pain and suffering
for someone's child, should absolutely involve.
But if you choose abortion, this is what that's going to, this is
going to mean for your child. And they're, I know they're not
being told that I know because I've talked to patients and
families who've been through this with other physicians.
You know, the far, if we get farther along in pregnancy, if
we start thinking about later second trimester and even into
the third trimester, which oftentimes right, is the
justification used for 3rd trimester abortions.
Well, for fetal conditions, we have to be able to do this.
First of all, no, you don't. You can deliver the baby and
provide baby with appropriate care that may or may not be life
saving depending on the condition.
But as you said, we're not always right about these
diagnosis either. And if we are dismembering that
baby in the second trimester, we have destroyed any possibility
of discovering that we were actually wrong about our
diagnosis first of all. Second of all, even if the
diagnosis is right, that child has value and worth and can feel
pain when he or she is dismembered, so we should avoid.
That it makes me feel sick because we wouldn't do this to
dogs, I mean. Right, we did the new matches.
Even disabled puppies, right, like ripping them live
dismemberment. Like we would be like, oh, PETA
would be all over that. Like you'd have all the advocacy
groups like politically left and right, I think could come
together and be like, this is wrong.
Right. But we're doing this actively to
babies in hospitals under the guise of healthcare today,
right? And we all act like the Reddit
acts like, oh, this was the loving thing.
We opted for this because we didn't want baby to feel pain.
I'm like, this is unreal that people misunderstand this
because they've never been told it right.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And then even if we look at, you know, how abortions are done
later in pregnancy, maybe some people would look at that as
more humane. But typically, what I certainly
don't, but typically what's done is the baby's heart is injected
with a substance that will induce a heart attack so that
the baby dies in utero. Well, I don't know about you,
but I personally would not want to have a heart attack induced,
not only because it would end my life but also it's not a
pleasant experience to go through a heart attack.
And aren't they stabbing the child's chest with a needle in
order to do that? Like, it's not like they just
press the button and the baby has this heart attack, Guys,
they have to Pierce the baby's chest cavity.
Yes, with a long sharp needle. Like like imagine getting like
stabbed in the chest and then you have a heart attack.
Right, right. And it's one thing if that is
being done for a life saving intervention, but when you're
doing it to end a life, to kill baby, yes, that's even worse.
So yes. So a heart attack is induced so
that then when the woman's labor is induced, which by the way is
another thing that I don't think gets talked about enough.
So those of us who are pro-life often times are accused of being
forced birthers, right? All these people that are
advocating for 3rd trimester abortions, mom still has to go
through labor. So she's not avoiding labor.
The difference is she's delivering a dead baby.
She's not delivering a live baby and a, and a baby that whose
life was ended, you know, I would say in a pretty horrific
way as you just described. And, and then we've induced a
heart attack. So actually, if we truly cared
about Women's Health and, and saving women and, you know,
taking care of them as quickly as possible, we do deliveries.
We don't do abortions and every doctor knows that.
That's the thing. Every doctor knows that.
So, so, yeah, I think, you know, parents need to understand that
these, if they're being recommended an abortion in these
situations, they need to understand what that truly is,
what it means for them, for their babies, so that they can
make decisions that are best for both of them.
Can you explain briefly for folks what perinatal palliative
care or Hospice is? This is a big term, but I think
that when we're talking about suffering for baby, outcomes for
baby, like you said, there's families that think that there
is no other option than termination.
They're not told what termination really is, but
they're just told that. What are some of these other
options in terms of palliative care, Hospice and ways to give
baby a chance? Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so perinatal palliative care or perinatal Hospice was
kind of modeled after what we think of as Hospice at the end
of life. So if an adult, you know,
towards the end of their life has a condition that we expect
to lead to their death, then there are things that we do to
support them. Again, it's not just go suffer
and until your life is over, you know, there are comfort measures
that we can provide, things like that and, and a whole support
system. We experienced it myself with
my, with my dad before he passed away.
And it is a really great supportive environment for
families. So perinatal Hospice is, is
similar in some ways, but it's for a baby right after they're
born. So again, with a condition that
we expect may lead to a shorter lifespan, it provides support
through the pregnancy through a multidisciplinary approach where
you have doctors who can provide pain management if that's what's
needed for the baby afterwards, where you have neonatologists
involved. Because maybe this is a
condition that could potentially have survival with certain
treatments. But you might need to wait and
see how baby responds to interventions after delivery,
which is actually the most important thing I think for
families to know is to say, let's try to do some
interventions after delivery and let's see how baby responds.
That's actually the best predictor of how a baby will do.
The the biggest factor for a poor prognosis after delivery,
meaning baby doesn't survive, is a prenatal diagnosis.
Actually, there have been studies that have looked at
that, that when babies had the same condition, but it wasn't
diagnosed until after delivery, they do better.
Why is that? Because when we don't know that
they have one of these conditions, what's the automatic
response after delivery? Oh, baby is struggling.
Baby needs help, so we're going to do these interventions.
And again, shocker, when you do interventions, often times
babies will do better. So, so I think that that study
is actually very illuminating that the biggest factor for a
poor prognosis and how baby does after delivery is having that
diagnosis before delivery. When we don't find out about it
until after delivery, we automatically start
interventions. And then often times babies will
do better. But perinatal palliative care
can come along in those cases where maybe you've tried
interventions or maybe babies born so small that those
interventions just aren't possible, to then provide
supportive care to the family, to provide supportive care to
the baby to ensure baby isn't suffering and to walk the family
through that grief process. We know for grief in general
that mental health outcomes after grief are better when you
walk through those stages of grief.
And what abortion does is it it unnaturally truncates that
grieving process and doesn't allow families to really walk
through the stages of grief that they really need to in order to
appropriately grieve the loss of their child.
And the the other thing is that I think perinatal palliative
care helps them see that even though your child's life may
have been short, that was still your child and your child still
has value and worth. It gives a family an intact baby
to hold and to grieve, even if that baby does pass away.
My hospital that I work at does a great job with this, this and
we have so many mementos that we can do for families so that they
can have memories of that child. And so I just think the beauty
of of perinatal palliative care when it's appropriate.
I think a lot of times we need to be doing interventions, not
not just doing palliative care, but but when it's appropriate.
I think that the beauty of it is that it it supports these
families while helping them see the value of their child.
That's so beautifully shared. Thank you.
And I hope it's a good myth, Buster for people listening who
maybe can pass this to a friend who's facing a poor prenatal
diagnosis or just for everyone to have this working knowledge
because somebody eventually we know somebody or hear of
somebody and they just don't know that.
There are doctors that specialize in this.
And there are so many options for ways to value that little
life and take care of mom too. I want to get into the abortion
pill now because there's a lot in the news media about this.
I want to trace what's happening and then hear your expert
opinion on it. We're going to talk about that,
but we're going to get into solutions to, you know, how do
we get ourselves all healthier and make this country and beyond
a healthier place for moms to have babies, healthier place for
those babies. That's the end game here, right?
But to break it down a little bit, so recently the Supreme
Court did a ruling that ultimately upended the 5th
Circuit. So there's another court system
that said that the abortion pill cannot be shipped via mail
because there's pro-life states like Louisiana.
Who was the plaintiff in that case who said who has, you know,
pro-life? They protect babies in their
state. But you can ship in these drugs
via the postal mail system from, say, California, which is super
pro abortion. So in this particular case,
there was a young woman whose boyfriend coerced her into
taking the abortion drug. He ordered it for her from
California, forced her to take it under threat or, you know,
horrible. She, the baby is dead and she's
devastated, right? So she's also a plaintiffs with
the state of Louisiana in that case.
I share that because people look at the abortion rate today and
you can see it's going up and you can point directly to mail
order abortion, press the button, basically get it shipped
to you. What are the dangers of mail
order abortion? So there are significant dangers
associated with the abortion drugs even at baseline, but
especially with the way they're being dispensed right now
through the mail with no, no medical supervision.
I'm going to get to that. I think people need to
understand there is no medical supervision over these drugs
right now, even at their baseline, even under the quote
UN quote best of circumstances. So where women are being seen in
person before they get them, they're being seen in person for
follow up visits. They're only taking them early
in pregnancy, all of that. Even with the best of
circumstances, we know that abortion drugs are just
inherently dangerous. They have a four times higher
complication rate than surgical abortions.
When you look at international data.
And you know of course some recent analysis that have been
done of insurance claims data show that close to one in nine
women who take these drugs will have a serious adverse event.
And that data all came from the actually or the majority of it
came from when the in person dispensing requirement was still
in place. So we know that at baseline,
these drugs are inherently dangerous the way they are being
dispensed now, thanks to the Biden administration removing,
there was only one in person visit left that was required and
that was before women were given these abortion drugs.
Now that that's been removed, these drugs are available online
with no interaction with a medical professional.
So I think this is another really important point to make,
especially for any your pro-life audience, because I've heard a
lot of people in the pro-life movement still refer to these as
telehealth or telemedicine abortions.
We have got to stop calling them that.
They are not telehealth. No, no, not, not at all.
You know, first of all, there's no health benefit that's being
accomplished. But second of all, they're
literally exactly, definitely not for baby.
It's ending baby's lives. So that's not health.
The purpose of medicine is health, healing and wholeness.
Abortion does none of those things for for baby certainly,
but also doesn't do any of those things for mom.
But not only that, there is 0 interaction in most cases with
any kind of medical professional And to put this to a test,
Applog recently put out an expose video.
Now I feel bad talking to you about this because live action
is like the the experts of your expose video.
You really briefly, I should have already asked you to do
this. Can you tell people what a plug
is? Oh, yes, you have it beautifully
on your we're going to we're going to link it as well.
But this is absolutely along with every life behind the
Rethink pregnancy campaign. But what is a plug?
And then tell me about this investigation because it was
phenomenal. Yes.
So we are the American Association of Pro-life OBGYN's.
We are the largest non sectarian professional medical
organization for pro-life medical professionals in the
world. We've got just over 8000 members
now across the country and really I think have become the
medical voice for the pro-life movement to say that good
science, good medicine is consistent with the pro-life
perspective and we desire to practice life affirming
medicine. And so, yeah, so we decided
because I was, we've seen a lot of videos, including many that
live action had put out showing how easy it it is to get these
pills online. Obviously men can get them.
Rosalie Marquez, the the plaintiff, the Co plaintiff and
the case out of Louisiana, her boyfriend, as you said, got
online and ordered these pills. I was really interested to see
because they, the, the sites and the companies that are
dispensing these pills will say that there is medical oversight
still, that there's somebody, you know, who knows who because
nobody's name is on anything, but there's somebody reviewing
this and ensuring that there's some kind of medical
supervision. So we really wanted to put that
to the test. So I got on to plan C, put that
I was in Indiana, which is my home state where abortion is
almost completely illegal. And it popped up with I think 18
different websites where I could get these abortion drugs from.
So I picked Aid Access, which is one of the biggest distributors
of the abortion drugs online, and I just wanted to see.
So I went in in the end. I was a 13 year old with
basically every single contraindication meaning a
reason why these drugs would be life threatening that you could
possibly have. So I was a 13 year old with an
IUD in place which would increase my risk of ectopic
pregnancy with a history of ectopic pregnancy which would
also increase my risk further of ectopic pregnancy which is life
threatening and the abortion drugs don't treat it with three
previous C sections on blood thinners.
This 13 year old has been through a lot but you just put
it all out to trigger something and the alarm says yes.
I mean it was so ridiculous that at the end I looked at our
communications manager and we both said okay, if anyones
looking at this they're going to say there's no way that this
person actually. Not giving exactly.
So they would pop up warnings, but all I had to do was say I
acknowledge, OK, So what 13 year old is actually going to
understand the true risk that she is at with all of those
conditions? That you just say.
Yes, exactly, I said. I didn't know how far along I
was, so that's another red flag, right?
They said. That you would send an abortion
drug even from the pro-choice perspective to a woman who
doesn't even know how far along she is.
That it violates all the at least rhetoric that the pro
abortion side uses about safety for women because you're you
could be, you know, second, third trimester doing the
abortion drug, incredibly high risk for you.
And also the baby can be born alive.
It could be harmful to the baby. I mean, I mean, it is harmful to
the baby period, but in a special way harmful.
It's insane. Baby could be born alive out,
you know this is marketed as needed or necessary for women in
rural areas that don't have access to healthcare.
Well those are exactly the women that are going to suffer the
most complications and babies that are going to suffer the
most. You know what if she is 26 weeks
along, well, if she delivered in a hospital, they could take care
of her baby. If she delivers 3 hours away
from the hospital, her baby will die.
And we know that this is happening and women are seeing
their babies and seeing their babies either, you know, maybe
they are 10 or 11 weeks, but they still can see their baby
and see that that's their baby, not just a clump of cells, which
of course is what they're told or see.
They're much farther along baby and then realize, Oh my
goodness, what did I do? So, you know, the mental health
impact that that has, not to mention the physical impact.
You know, we know that the farther along in pregnancy a
woman is when she takes these drugs, the higher the risk of
complications for her as well. And so even when I said I didn't
know how far long I was, they literally have a back button
built into their system. So this is not the back button
on the web browser. This is built into their system
that they said, well, give us your best guess.
So I went back and then I picked a last period that I knew would
make me about 12 weeks and then I could proceed.
And so then you get to the end. They have all of these things,
the patient agreement form that you have to read and agree to,
but then they have their own things, complete lies, saying
pregnancy is very dangerous to your health, abortion is much
safer, which is untrue. And again, how manipulative,
right, of some young scared girl that gets on this website to
order these drugs because she's pregnant and she's scared.
And then it said that once I submitted my request that it
would be reviewed by a healthcare professional and that
if then I was approved, then I would receive an e-mail with a
payment link and to confirm my address.
So I hit submit literally within a minute and a half.
I had an e-mail in my inbox with the payment information and to
confirm my address. So you know.
There was no. Doctors automatically generated
because also if anyone with any kind of medical background,
honestly if anyone had looked at that, they'd be like, this is
crazy, a 13 year old with this history.
But obviously if anybody with a medical background had checked
it, they would have said no, you can't receive these pills until
you've been evaluated by a physician.
And so I submitted my payment and within about 3-2 and a half,
three days, the pills were in my mailbox in Indiana again, where
abortion is illegal from shipped from Los Angeles, CA with no
name associated with it. And then just AQR code with very
when you scan the QR code, it was very minimal instructions of
how to take the pills. And, you know, clearly said, if
you you feel like you're having complications, go to the
emergency room. You can just tell them that
you're having a miscarriage. That was right there.
They're telling women to lie to the doctors like me, who then
show up in the emergency room to take care of these
complications. And also then they're coded as
pregnancy complications. This is the other thing just in
our reporting data that is such a light that I had a
misunderstanding is we are we are because of legalized
abortion. It makes it look like pregnancy
is more dangerous because any complication with abortion is
coded as a pregnancy complication medically as
opposed to an abortion complication.
Absolutely. And a lot of people don't know
that the CDC actually does not track maternal deaths by
specific pregnancy outcome. So we which we absolutely should
be doing. And again, this is something
people on both sides of this issue should be in agreement
about. If we care about Women's Health,
why wouldn't we want to know what is the mortality rate and
complication rate related to live birth?
What is it related to miscarriage?
What is it related to abortion? These are just basic statistics
that if we want to improve Women's Health, we should want
to know. But who fights the tracking of
it by specific pregnancy outcome every time?
It's the abortion industry and their allies within the medical
community every single time. And you know, I remember a few
years ago Indiana passed an abortion complication reporting
law, which has actually been wonderful for our state because
now we can track complications. But of course, the abortion
industry, Planned Parenthood, ACOG, they all fought it.
And I actually said in my testimony, if they are so
convinced that abortion is as safe as they say that it is, why
aren't they supporting this? Because they could prove me
wrong If we tracked complications and it really is
as safe as they say that it is, then they should be supporting
this so that they could have the chance to prove me wrong.
I think it's very telling that they are the ones that want to
avoid having good data on abortion outcomes for a
movement. You know, the pro abortion
movement, for a movement that claims to care about women and
want to empower women, this is the least empowering thing I can
imagine. It is the most, gosh, I don't
even know a strong enough word. It's the most just demeaning and
crippling thing, I guess that I can think of for a woman to say.
You have to do this all by yourself, go through this
horrendous experience and then know that you made a decision
that led to your child's life being ended.
And, and that's what's going to fix the problems that you're
facing. And that's what's going to make
your dreams possible. And, you know, we're seeing the
emotional fallout from that and the the mental health fallout
from that. And, and it really, I think, you
know, if we truly care about women, we should care about
helping them avoid that situation.
No woman should feel alone when she's pregnant or feel like
there aren't people that want to help her no matter her
situation. There's an option line number
that I want to just say right now and people listening can
maybe write this down. Save it in your notebook on your
phone. Because if you know someone or
you hear of someone even like on social media who is facing an
unplanned pregnancy and they feel alone, there are people
that want to provide free confidential care material,
resources, even prenatal help, all the things she may need to
not be alone and be able to choose life for her baby.
The number IS180712 HELP 1800 seven 1-2 HELP or
1-800-712-4357. We'll put this also in the show
notes along with your amazing site.
But I think what you're saying is so key.
We should all know this and everyone should be aware of
this. A few more questions just on the
current mechanics of the abortion pill and its risks to
women. 100% of the time, almost dangerous for baby.
Sometimes the baby survives by the way, and they have to go
back for a second abortion. Or you can save the baby's life
through abortion pill reversal. But the FDA label for the
abortion pill warns women that one out of every 25 of them will
end up in the emergency room. And there's more recent studies
that have been done than it could be as few as one out of
every 21 women. Why are women going to the
emergency room after taking the abortion pill?
Yeah, well, this is, I think it's really important for people
to understand how common this is.
So when some of the newer data came out, I was interviewed
about it and asked if it surprised me and I said no.
I practice in a state where abortion is illegal and our
group is regularly called down to the emergency room to take
care of complications of the abortion drugs.
So, and in fact, when I go down there, often times the emergency
room doctors will say doctors that aren't pro-life even, we'll
just say, gosh, there's another one.
I mean, it just, it's so common. So women are going to the
emergency room. I mean, sometimes, and this is a
claim that will be made by the other side.
Well, yes, women go to the emergency room because they're
having an abortion and they're just afraid.
Yes, that's true. But what does that say to you?
That says that she probably received a little to no
appropriate counseling to understand what she was going to
actually go through. So that is certainly some of the
women that are going to the emergency room.
But I don't want to diminish still the severity and the
importance of that because it means that they are not getting
support either and have no medical supervision.
So the emergency room is the only place they have to go to.
But more commonly we see women coming in with potentially life
threatening bleeding. Even so, hemorrhage we know is a
significant risk of these drugs, especially if they take them
farther along in pregnancy. Retain tissue or an incomplete
abortion where not all of the baby is passed from the uterus
or not all of the pregnancy tissues like placenta membranes,
things like that. And so retain tissue is there
that can lead to more bleeding, can lead to the need for
emergency surgery. Infection is actually a major
risk from these drugs and a really atypical kind of
infection that and this isn't talked about a lot, but I think
it's really important. This is actually what
precipitated the black box warning that is still on
Mythopristone right now. So after Mythopristone was
approved, there were 4 documented deaths of women in
here in the state of California from all from the same kind of
infection. So it's a particular kind of
sepsis that is really dangerous because it's very difficult to
diagnosis sepsis because women don't present with the typical
symptoms that we would see in the typical findings of sepsis.
They kind of look like they maybe have the flu or just like
they're just don't feel great, but they don't, they oftentimes
don't have fevers. A lot of the other things that
we look for to to diagnose sepsis.
And then they progress from that to being dead oftentimes within
24 hours. So it's rapidly progressive.
It's very difficult to treat once it really becomes severe.
And in fact, we have heard stories in the news in the last
couple of years of I don't have these women's medical records,
but I can almost guarantee Amber Thurman, many people will
remember hearing her story. A woman out of Georgia who was
pregnant with twins, who travelled to North Carolina was
given the abortion drugs and she ended up dying.
Now, Pro Publica tried to claim that it was because of Georgio's
abortion law, but it was 100% because of the abortion drugs
that she took in. Pro Publica actually laid out
her, her timeline once she presented to the hospital
actually relatively well. And from looking at that, I and
many other physicians are pretty convinced that she died of, of
this particular kind of sepsis. It's called Clostridium is the
the bacteria that causes it. And then around the same time,
there's another woman, Alana Dixon, in Las Vegas, who also
died from a rapidly progressive sepsis picture that again, I
don't have her medical records, so I can't say 100%, but I think
was likely the same kind of sepsis.
So, you know, those are just women that we know about because
their stories happen to make it into the news.
And, and wildly, just to interject really quick what you
just said, which is so important.
The media framed these stories that made it into the news as a
reason why pro-life laws are bad and why we need abortion, when
it's abortion that is very likely responsible for killing
not just the babies but the women in these situations.
Absolutely, absolutely wild. It's like the.
Amount of gaslighting, right? The American people.
This is what's happening when it's the absolute opposite.
It's actually abortion that's responsible for the death.
Exactly. It's crazy.
Exactly. And where were the people that
gave these women the drugs? You know, when I was in my
medical training, it was drilled into us that if we prescribed a
medication, if we did a surgical procedure, did any kind of
intervention on a patient, that patient was our responsibility.
So she has a complication. It's your responsibility.
Your responsibility to her as your patient is to manage that
complication. And how many times do we as pro
lifers get accused of your intervening in the physician
patient relationship? I think we need to make it very
clear there is no physician patient relationship when it
comes to abortion, especially now with the way these drugs are
being shipped through the mail. Again, when I got them, there
was no doctor's name on it. And we have states like
California and New York that have shield laws to protect
these doctors from any repercussions from honestly,
frank, medical malpractice. And but there, you know,
there's, there's no physician patient relationship here.
These women get abandoned to their local emergency rooms.
Often times they either lie because they've been told to lie
or maybe the physician that sees them doesn't even ask.
I think that happens a lot of times too.
It's just assumed she's having a miscarriage.
They don't just don't even ask. And you know, the important
thing about that and, and why women should understand why you
shouldn't lie about it actually when you go into the emergency
room is because there have been studies that have looked at
outcomes when women, when we know from insurance data that
women took abortion drugs. And then if their complication
was miscoded as a miscarriage complication, those women
actually have higher hospitalization rates.
They have worse outcomes. This infection that I just
talked about, we don't see that with first trimester
miscarriages. You only see it with abortions
in the first trimester due to these abortion drugs.
So it's important for that doctor that's taking care of you
as the woman to have accurate information.
And yet this is another way that the abortion industry, I think
is, is showing that they don't care about Women's Health, is
they're telling women to lie about it and they're not
providing for ongoing medical care for women.
Why were the multiple doctors visits originally when the
abortion pill was approved? I think 2000 there were multiple
doctors visits. They've all been removed, the
last one being removed under Biden administration like you
mentioned. And unfortunately, the Trump
administration has still done nothing to reinstate nothing.
Why? Why did that happen?
Well, so they were originally put into place.
So you know, many people and I know you guys have done some
great work showing what happened with the approval of the
abortion pill under the Clinton administration.
It was very much politically motivated.
It went through an expedited process that typically is
reserved for life saving drugs. Imagine a drug that whose sole
purpose in this circumstances to end a life was was approved
through an expedited process. But because of that, the FDA
recognized there are real inherent risks here.
And so we need to do something to minimize those risks.
So they actually originally had three required visits, one
before the woman was given the drugs, and then two follow up
visits because they knew that there was a high rate of
complications of incomplete abortions.
And so women needed follow up care to screen for these
complications and make sure that they were doing OK.
And then with time, with subsequent, first under the
Obama administration and then under the Biden administration,
these were removed. And so now there's no in person
care required whatsoever. And you're right, the all the
Trump administration would have to do would be to go back to how
it was under the first Trump administration to undo what the
Biden administration did to at least put back into place that
in person dispensing requirement.
Now, of course, that's, that's not enough that it's going to
slightly mitigate the risk for women, but it's it's not.
And it will save some some lives of preborn children as well.
You can't ship them from pro abortion states into pro-life
states, so you're going to also prevent all the law breaking
that's happening. Exactly, exactly.
I mean it. Will it will help towards that
you'll still have black market abortion drugs being shipped by
all kinds of people, right? Which is effectively happening
now, which that's another enforcement mechanism that needs
to clamp down on that because you can, you can enforce laws
and actually clamp down on these, you know, big pharma
groups that are making all this money from black market
abortions. But the in person doctor visit
will help stem some of that. Of course, the drug shouldn't be
on the market. Right.
Exactly, exactly. It's dangerous, it carries no
health benefit for women and it's ending the lives of
millions of, of preborn children.
But right, there's already a law actually on the books that if
the federal government would enforce it, we could put a stop
to this, the Comstock Act, which is still on the books, which
prevents the, the mailing of abortion inducing drugs.
So, so there are mechanisms that could be used on a, on a federal
level to, to help put a stop to this.
And you know, and again, I think that it, a big part of this is
that more people need to be aware that this is going on.
I think people, again, they hear telemedicine and they think,
well, you know, I've had telemedicine visits with my
doctor. It seemed like it was okay, but
they don't really. I think I understand what's
actually happening with these drugs right now.
I've got to ask this. We touched on it, but I want to
really hear you explain this for folks because it's so important.
We are told that abortion is safer than pregnancy.
Why is that false? And what's the truth about the
risks of abortion? There is a common narrative out
there that really stems from one study put out by Doctor Daniel
Grossman, who is an abortionist, that said that abortion is 14
times safer than childbirth. And that line unfortunately
really took off and, and now I've heard repeated by so many
people. The problem with that, in order
to explain the problem with that study is that you actually have
to go back to sort of basic math.
So if we all remember when we learned how to compare
fractions, we learned that in order to compare 2 fractions,
what has to be the same, your denominator in those fractions
has to be the same. This study compared 2 fractions
with different denominators is the simplest way to explain it.
So, so out of the sort of four variables, so if you're thinking
about the two fractions, you've got 2 numerators, 2
denominators. Out of those 4 variables,
there's actually only one out of the four that we accurately
track in the United States, and that is the number of live
births. And so it actually biased the
study towards looking like there are more deaths associated with
live births on a percentage basis than than associated with
abortions. There are many, many problems
with our reporting in the United States.
We actually do a very bad job collecting data.
One of them is that we don't actually know the number of
abortions that are happening in the United States because
there's not a universal reporting requirement.
And some of the states like California that are doing
probably the most abortions, we think, aren't reporting their
data. So we don't actually know how
many abortions are happening. We also don't know how many
deaths are occurring after abortions.
And part of that is because abortions are happening with
physicians that are often times itinerant physicians.
So they're traveling around the country, they're popping in,
they're doing abortions, or now they're just prescribing or
sending abortion pills from a far away state.
How are they ever to know if the woman who takes those drugs dies
after taking them? They don't know.
That's not reported back to them.
It's not reported back to the company.
It's likely not reported to the FDA, so we're not tracking those
outcomes very well either. We also honestly aren't doing a
great job of tracking maternal deaths after live births even.
And now there have been some efforts in the last decade or so
to improve that, like a check box on a death certificate if a
woman was pregnant within the last year or so.
That has helped a little bit. But there was new data that came
out from the CDC actually on maternal mortality, which needs
a lot of work in this country. But there are a lot of really
interesting findings that actually don't support the
abortion narrative. One of them is that the vast
majority of maternal deaths are preventable.
And that doesn't mean they're preventable by aborting a baby.
It means they're preventable if we will do appropriate
interventions, if we'll treat conditions appropriately, if
women will get access to the actual care that they need.
And I'm going to put a pin in that and come back to that in
just a second. The other thing is that a lot of
deaths that are reported as maternal deaths are actually due
to mental health disorders, so suicide or due to drug
overdoses. So while maybe that was
exacerbated by the pregnancy and the stress of delivery, maybe
not. Because if you look at other
data, it actually says that, you know, women who've had
deliveries and, and our mothers actually have better mental
health outcomes. So or maybe it just happened to
be associated in the time frame of within a year after delivery.
So that doesn't mean that pregnancy is inherently more
dangerous. It means that we've got a mental
health crisis in this country that we need to do a better job
of treating. Doesn't mean that an abortion
will improve that. In fact, we know that it'll
worsen it because women that have pre-existing mental health
disorders have worse mental health outcomes after abortions
than if they were to carry their pregnancies to term.
So there's a lot of factors in there.
There's a lot of things that are being included in that maternal
mortality number that aren't actually due to actual
complications of the pregnancy. And like we talked about
earlier, we're not tracking outcomes of maternal deaths
based on particular pregnancy outcomes.
So some of these may be after an abortion, but they're not
getting counted as a death after an abortion.
The other thing that I think people are not talking about
enough is we're hearing a lot about closures of Labor and
delivery units across the country and maternal healthcare
deserts, which are a very real thing.
I've seen it even within my own hospital system.
So the hospitals that I work at now, we're getting patients from
communities that are an hour and a half away even because that
were their closest labor and delivery unit.
That's a real problem. It means that women aren't
getting good prenatal care when they need it.
They're not getting management of their blood pressure, their
diabetes, things like that that they need during their pregnancy
because it's too far for them to travel to get to a labor and
delivery care or to an OBGYN. Why is that happening?
Well, the pro abortion side will say that it's because of
pro-life laws. They'll point to pro-life States
and they'll say, look, they've had this many labor and delivery
closures. Well, the problem is they're not
looking at the 20 years leading up to it where that was already
starting. Why are they closing?
There's a variety of reasons, but one of the big driving
reasons is a falling number of births.
A falling number of pregnancies, yes.
And labor and delivery units are expensive to run, so you need to
have a certain number of deliveries every year in order
to maintain a labor and delivery unit.
In order to attract an OBGYN to your community or midwives, you
need to have enough business to keep them busy.
Why are our birth rates falling? Well, partly because of all the
abortions that we're doing, you know, last year what we had, So
what was it close to 1.1 million abortions in the US and that's.
Just what's reported, we don't know.
Those 1.1 million abortions actually resulted in births.
We could then reopen a lot of these labor and delivery units.
We know that fertility rates are falling, you know, from a
variety of reasons. Of course, that's
multifactorial, but that's actually what's leading to
closure of Labor and delivery units, which then is leading to
worsening of maternal health outcomes because we don't have
enough care. And so that's actually the
problem in abortion and is contributing to that.
And that's actually something that I don't think that people
are talking about enough. That's such an incredibly
important point that you made and it requires a shift, a
mindset shift that instead of like seeing pregnancy as some
burden, a disease, something to end, right?
Because we were going to terminate the baby or whatever
it is, seeing it and said as let's care for both patients.
Yes, absolutely. And that is possible.
It's being done by pro-life OBGYN's like yourself.
And the thousands that exist in this country that are doing that
work are pregnancy resource centers, the thousands of those
that exist that provide free, confidential care for moms and
babies and young families. What gives you hope in the
landscape of all of this? That we can rethink pregnancy as
a culture and really care for both mom and baby.
Yeah, well, I think just even talking about pregnancy from a
different framework is so important, not only to help moms
choose life who are pregnant, but also to help women who are,
you know, getting married in their early 20s and thinking,
oh, maybe I want to delay pregnancy for a variety of
reasons. Thinking about it from a
different perspective and saying, you know, we we're
partnered with every life in this campaign.
And I love their slogan, Make more babies.
It's it's smart for them from a business standpoint.
It's smart for us as OBGYN's, of course we want that.
But it's also smart for us as a culture, because that's what's
going to actually grow and strengthen our culture is, is
getting that fertility rate back up, helping strengthen families,
build families, but also helping women and men to see pregnancy
through a different lens. And I think if we do that,
again, not only is it going to help women make better choices
once they are pregnant, but it's going to help them think more
about maybe I want to start a family sooner than I had
originally thought. Because look at all the benefits
of that. Maybe I want if I'm in a
position to do so. And, and you know, I don't have
any children myself. So I fully understand that
sometimes that's out of your control.
But if you're in a position to do so, you actually, for your
health benefits, want to think about getting pregnant, having
babies before the age of 30 if you can, because that's going to
reduce your your cancer risk even more.
That's going to give you that much more time with your
children. And so it gives me hope that I
do think that we're seeing this switch.
I think that we're seeing a lot in our culture of a desire from
women for something more, something different.
I think, you know, especially women in their 20s and 30s have
their their parents and their grandparents to look at and what
our generations have done and say, you know what, that didn't
seem to really bring them more happiness.
And so I do think that we're seeing a a switch a lot in our
culture now to say maybe we want to do something different.
And it's kind of radically counter cultural right now to
get married young and to have babies young.
But I think the wonderful thing about that is it's going to
improve outcomes for moms for babies.
It's going to make for happier families.
So that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Also, just the fact that I think there are a lot more groups that
are so interested in looking at this.
You know, let's really take a deep dive into Women's Health
and have accurate information about Women's Health.
And a big part of that has to be what are the benefits of
pregnancy? What are things we can do to
help continue to make pregnancy outcomes even better?
And what are the sort of breaking technology things that
we can look at? One of the other things we talk
about in this campaign is something called microchymerism,
which I think is fascinating. It's where cells from the baby
actually get into the mom's bloodstream and stay with her
for decades. And there's emerging science now
to show that those cells might actually help in healing for mom
when she's wounded or has some sort of disease.
They may help prevent chronic autoimmune conditions, things
like that. So there's there's just this
whole amazing horizon out there that if we can value life, value
pregnancy, value family formation and really prioritize
that, I think that we'll see a much larger cultural and
societal benefit. Thank you for your work, Doctor
Francis. It's so important and I'm so
excited to see the fruit of people feeling more safe and
supported and able that they can be mothers and that this is a
beautiful part of our design and not something to attack us in
any way. Thank you so much for your work.
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here. A big thank you to our channel
partner EWTN. EWTN is the world's largest
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