Weber ultimately underwent the procedure. She said she wanted readers to know that the state’s pro-life law was “so dangerous for women.” But in reality, assuming her account is accurate — if it’s true that doctors refused to perform a lifesaving medical procedure because of the state’s pro-life law — the entire ordeal doesn’t prove anything other than that some doctors are incompetent and don’t know how to navigate relatively simple state laws.

The facts are these: the South Carolina “heartbeat bill” explicitly spells out that a doctor can perform an abortion if he determines “that a medical emergency exists or is performed to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” For good measure, the law directly states that both “intrauterine fetal demise” and “miscarriage” constitute a medical emergency that can justify an abortion.

This is the substance of the law. There are no gimmicks or hidden rules. By her own account there was absolutely no reason that Elisabeth Weber should not have received a D&C. The problem was not with state law, but with the doctors who were either too ignorant or too risk-averse (or both) to do proper medicine.

This is and always has been untrue; Every pro-life law in the United States, without exception, contains provisions that allow for emergency medical intervention to save a mother’s life. //

Doctors are forbidden from killing an unborn child in an act of abortion, but they are more than able to perform related procedures that can save a mother’s life (all the more so in tragic cases like Weber’s, where the baby has died, or even in Thurman’s case, where the babies were killed).

We should never fall for this type of misdirection. Abortion advocates who claim that such laws forbid doctors from saving the lives of women should point to the specific part of the law they claim makes this so.