Regarding Kate Cox, pro-lifers should empathize and educate, not scorn and shame
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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I do not know whether the Texas Supreme Court made the correct decision in denying Kate Cox an emergency, late-term abortion, and unless you are a physician, neither do you. Attorneys for Cox, already a mother of two, argued she should be granted an exception to the Lone Star State’s near-total abortion ban under its provision for the life of the mother. The state Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling siding with Cox, arguing that her attorneys did not prove she was in “life-threatening physical condition.” Reasonable people could argue either side, and pro-lifers who consider Cox incorrect should emphasize and educate in their responses if they wish to share one.
What they should not do, if the pro-life movement has any prayer of winning hearts and minds and votes instead of costing conservatives a third successive election cycle, is accuse Cox of deciding “to kill her 21-week daughter because the baby has Trisomy 18.”
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Despite the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, Democrats managed to obliterate the supposed red wave that was going to manifest in 2022, in large part due to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. When purple state Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) attempted to clinch the Virginia state legislature for Republicans with the poll-tested compromise of a 15-week abortion ban, Republicans failed for a second year in a row, not because the proposal or the candidates were nearly as extreme as those in 2022 but because average voters, moderates included, simply do not trust Republicans on the abortion matter.
A crucial element fueling that distrust is not just what we say but how we say it. The Cox story is a part of this.
On Wednesday, the Washington Examiner published a compelling pro-life response to Cox’s case by Keara Burke, who has delivered a trisomy 18 baby to term. Burke crucially recognizes that Cox is no wicked woman — she’s a mother distraught over a complicated pregnancy that she very much wanted — and empathizes with her. Burke then educates us about perinatal hospice, which she describes as providing “assurance of a safe delivery for me, preservation of my future fertility, palliative care for our son so that he would never feel discomfort or pain, and wrap-around support services for our family.”
Note how the mother’s body and safety are not an afterthought in Burke’s response. In any pro-life argument, it cannot be, lest we allow the Left to spread the story that pro-lifers are happy to sacrifice women’s bodies in exchange for the unborn.
Again, I am not a doctor, and I don’t pretend to be, but I will highlight a few aspects of Cox’s obstetric history. She has had two cesarean sections and began leaking amniotic fluid at just 20 weeks of pregnancy. The primary reason her legal team has argued for an abortion over a likely fatally early delivery is that an abortion would allow Cox to deliver vaginally, whereas waiting could result in, according to a suit filed by a pro-choice advocacy group on her behalf, “gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, fetal macrosomia, post-operative infections, anesthesia complications, uterine rupture, and hysterectomy.”
Like all complicated pregnancies, Cox’s is unique. Some women can carry trisomy 18 pregnancies to term with little physical risk, and others cannot. Is this to say the state Supreme Court got it wrong and that Cox is in the latter category? Not only am I not a doctor, but I’m also not a lawyer, so, of course, I won’t make that judgment.
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But I will say that other women are listening. Cox has reportedly left the state to get an abortion elsewhere, bringing a sad situation to a sad end. But other women, and other men who simply can’t decide which side of the debate they fall on, are listening. Women are listening when crass “pro-lifers” accuse Cox of callously wishing to “kill” her baby simply because it might live to have a disability rather than if it’s born dead. Women are listening when these same advocates ignore Cox’s concern about her physical safety, and worse, when they write off “uterine rupture” and “hysterectomy” as minor inconveniences.
The pro-life movement must empathize and educate, but it also should develop a little more humility and a little more grace, lest we wish to hand Democrats all 60 seats in the Senate, with which they would codify Roe on a national level at last.