Jill Stanek has masterfully body-slammed the pro-choice community with a logical maneuver so powerful it would be irresistible if it happened to make any sense or involve actual facts, which, sadly, it does not. As usual, she is wrong in virtually everything she says, but is enjoying a wave of anti-choice congratulations over her latest clever obfuscation.

It is a tedious necessity, but I suppose we ought to take a closer look at what she’s saying, and what is actually true about what she’s saying (which are two very different things).

Stanek claims to have caught the pro-choice argument in a logical fork:

When exactly is a pregnancy terminated?

I realized last week that abortion proponents attempting to answer that question should run into problems. By trying to protect one flank, they’ve exposed another. . . .

What occurred to me was, to be consistent, the abortion industry’s definition of when a pregnancy begins should agree with its definition of when it ends. But the two don’t jibe.

For over 30 years, abortion proponents have maintained pregnancy begins when an embryo implants in the uterus and ends after a completed delivery.

“[A] woman is considered pregnant only when a fertilized egg has implanted in the wall of her uterus,” . . . states the [Alan] Guttmacher Institute, research arm of Planned Parenthood. . . .

But that logic would have to conclude a pregnancy ends when the fetus exits the uterus.

The uterus is only one part of a woman’s reproductive system. A pre-born baby may live in her mother’s uterus longer than any other place, but she doesn’t get there magically. Nor does she pop supernaturally from the uterus into the hands of the obstetrician. A pre-born human enters the uterus via the fallopian tube and exits via the vagina, or birth canal.

But according to pro-aborts, a fallopian tube carrying a newly created embryo has no bearing on pregnancy. It merely provides the portal of entry into the uterus.

How then can the abortion industry claim the portal of exit, the birth canal, has anything to do with pregnancy either? Once the baby is outside the uterus, they should consider the pregnancy over, terminated.

This is where a discussion of partial birth abortion comes in.

The argument here is that intact dilation and extraction abortions cannot be legal because the woman is no longer pregnant when the fetus exits the uterus, as Stanek claims it does during that procedure:

[T]he abortionist commits partial birth abortion by manually turning the baby inside the uterus to a breech position and delivering the entire baby outside the woman’s body except the baby’s head, which remains solely in the birth canal.

In other words, as Liberty Counsel stated in its brief, the baby is completely outside the uterus when the abortionist punctures and drains her skull.

Thus, by Stanek’s idiotic description, the fetus is hanging entirely outside the woman’s vagina (”or birth canal”), and only the head is still inside, meaning that the head would have to be positioned right at the vulva and could simply be delivered without the slightest further effort or risk to the woman. Presumably then the doctor viciously kills the pre-born human citizen baby . . . just for the hell of it, because those pro-aborts love to see pre-born human citizen babies die . . . or something. Needless to say, and skipping over the characteristically weird and emotionally manipulative language (”abortionist”?; “baby”?; “pre-born human”?(!); “her”?), this is wrong in every respect.

From the original paper describing the invention of the ID&X procedure:

[T]he surgeon grasps and removes a nearly intact fetus through an adequately dilated cervix. . . .

With a lower extremity [of the fetus] in the vagina, the surgeon uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the torso, the shoulders and the upper extremities.

The skull lodges at the internal cervical os. Usually there is not enough dilation for it to pass through. . . .

While maintaining . . . tension, lifting the [upper edge of the] cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.

Reassessing proper placement of the closed scissors tip and safe elevation of the cervix, the surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.

The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

Not a procedure for the squeamish - as in fact no surgical procedure is. (That’s not a moral observation, unless your morals are dictated by morbid photos mounted on placards at public demonstrations. It’s just a truth about surgery.) But note the important part: the head of the fetus remains inside the cervical os (the opening of the cervix) because it is too large to pass through. The procedure is performed with the head of the fetus inside the uterus, and the rest of the torso in the vagina (the feet may extend beyond the vulva, but the body certainly does not).

In fact, this much of the point to the ID&X procedure, and the reason why it is preferable for late-term abortions. As the author (Dr. Martin Haskell) notes, “[u]sually there is not enough dilation for [the fetal skull] to pass through” the cervix. And note also that this procedure, as published by Haskell in 1992, was developed and used by him in fetuses from 20-26 weeks’ gestation exclusively. (He felt it was easier and safer than dismembering the fetus in the uterus and removing it piecemeal.) Today, it is used in both the second and third trimesters - and the later in the gestational period the fetus is, the more danger there is to the pregnant woman to pass a large fetal skull through the cervix. This danger is especially acute in cases of pregnant teenagers, who may not be physically developed enough to undergo a vaginal delivery without trauma to the cervix and vagina. (Vaginal birth by teenage mothers is the most-common cause of the epidemic of recto-vaginal fistula in countries without adequate gynecological services.) ID&X reduces the size of the largest part of the fetus to allow it to pass through the woman’s cervix without danger - meaning that it is even less likely, beyond the second trimester, that the fetal skull will be delivered outside the uterus before compression. Other methods of abortion - especially induction abortions (induced miscarriages) - carry greater risks than ID&X. The purpose of the procedure in reducing these risks, and the greater risks imposed by banning it, are never addressed by those who used this procedure as a political wedge issue to begin the rollback of women’s autonomy.

But this is merely a factual error - one that is central to her entire argument (which she takes from a legal brief filed with the Supreme Court by Liberty Counsel in the pending ID&X ban case - meaning that this misconception is common across the anti-choice community, and in fact is the grounding not merely to their public arguments but to their legal strategy as well), but only one of several points on which she is confused.

In addition to her ignorance of the mechanism of the procedure she criticizes, she misunderstands or misrepresents pregnancy itself. She claims that the “pro-choice” (i.e., factually correct) definition of pregnancy has something to do with physical locality inside a woman’s reproductive system. Note her attempted logical argument above: if pregnancy begins when the embryo implants in the uterus, then “that logic would have to conclude a pregnancy ends when the fetus exits the uterus.” I don’t know what logic she’s using, but it’s not the logical kind of logic. There’s nothing about logic, or pregnancy, or, hell, living on Planet Earth with real Earth women, that requires some sort of fenestral symmetry to pregnancy - or any other process, for that matter. (A baseball game begins with the first pitch, but it doesn’t end with the last pitch - it ends with the last run or out, which takes place after the last pitch has been thrown. “Breaking and entering” begins when you enter a person’s premises without permission, but it doesn’t necessarily end when you leave them. An airline flight - by industry definition - begins when the plane pushes back from the boarding terminal, but it does not end when it arrives at the arrival terminal [it ends when the plane touches down, even if you have to spend the next three hours taxiing around]. There is nothing about saying “something starts with this process” that requires also saying “it ends when that process ends”.) In other words, there is no reason at all to believe that the conclusion “pregnancy ends when a fetus’s head exits the cervix” is logically implied by the fact that “a pregnancy begins when an embryo implants in the uterus” - there is simply no relation between the two, and nothing in any argument about pregnancy that I am aware of that posits one. Stanek is not merely making this up, she’s making it up out of nothing at all. Traditionally, pregnancy has been understood to end when the fetus is delivered entirely from the woman’s body - not just from one organ to another inside the woman. Having a 10-lb baby in your vagina certainly makes you pregnant - a fact that only a “pro-lifer” could overlook.

But beyond the vacuity of her “logical” argument, Stanek can’t even get the part about pregnancy right. It is true that a pregnancy begins when an embryo implants in the uterine lining - but not true that this is the definition of pregnancy. If it were an actual definition, not merely an instance of the phenomenon in question, then no other form of pregnancy would be possible. In particular, women with ectopic pregnancies wouldn’t be pregnant at all under this definition (and for precisely the same reason that Stanek thinks a woman with a partially-delivered fetus dangling from her vagina is no longer pregnant). This is nonsense. Ectopic pregnancies are certainly pregnancies - the pro-choice movement has often referred to them in discussing the conditions under which pregnancy and abortion occur, and pro-choicers, at least, are not confused on this point. What ectopic pregnancies and intra-uterine pregnancies have in common is that the embryo has implanted in the uterus woman’s body and is exerting hormonal influence over the woman’s body, initiating the changes and processes associated with gestation. What ectopic pregnancies have in common with early, unimplanted embryos is that they are both inside the Fallopian tube and not the uterus - but only Stanek’s argument implies that they are thereby not pregnancies. The standard position of pro-choicers and everyone else rationally knowledgeable about the issue is that “pregnancy” has nothing to do with the physical location of the embryo, but with its relation to the woman’s body. This means that the antecedent premise of Stanek’s argument - “abortion proponents have maintained pregnancy begins when an embryo implants in the uterus” - is also false. To be exact, it’s true for those pregnancies that take place inside the uterus, but not for ectopic pregnancies - which is enough to demonstrate that it’s the implantation that determines pregnancy, not the fact that it occurs in the uterus.

Note, finally, that even Stanek’s argument does not recognize its own “logic”. If implantation in the uterus defines the beginning of a pregnancy (it does not, as we’ve seen), then, by her argument, detachment from the uterus (not the exiting of the cervix) should define its end. But the fact that her argument fails to acknowledge its own premises is far less important than that those premises are simply false.

But even this confusion is not the worst in her piece. Stanek not only doesn’t understand pregnancy, and doesn’t understand how abortion works, she doesn’t understand what abortion even is.

The thrust of her piece is her opening question: “when is a pregnancy terminated?” This is key to her argument, which works this way: Since she has “proven” that pregnancy ends when the fetus’s head exits the uterus (it doesn’t), and since ID&X is performed with the fetus’s head outside the uterus (it isn’t), then ID&X is performed on women who aren’t pregnant. And since it is performed on women who aren’t pregnant, then, in the words of Liberty Counsel’s brief: ID&X is in fact “arguably not an abortion.” Thus (implicitly), because women have a right to abortion but ID&X is not an abortion, there is no reason the law cannot prohibit ID&X.

This is immensely stupid.

Apparently, women have a right to an abortion, but they don’t have a right to do anything about an unwanted fetus stuck in their vaginas.

Nonsense. Though we conventionally talk about the “right to abortion”, what women actually have - like all persons before the law have - is a right to control their bodies, and to equal enjoyment of the protections and liberties of the Constitution. This is the language explicitly used in the Roe decision, and since. Abortion is just a means of securing and exercising the general rights women already have. If those general liberty rights are compromised by some other condition impinging only upon women - like, say, having an unwanted fetus hanging half-in and half-out of their vaginas - those women have a perfect right to take action to regain their liberty and end its constraint by unwanted outside forces. If such action requires an abortion, they are entitled to an abortion. If it requires a procedure precisely identical to an abortion except that Jerry Falwell’s lawyers want to call it something else, then they’re entitled to that as well, whether or not you call it an abortion. “Proving” that ID&X is not abortion (because some women with full-grown fetuses inside their bodies aren’t really, you know, pregnant) is neither here nor there. The fundamental liberty right all women enjoy has nothing to do with whether their means of protecting and regaining their liberty is abortion or not; whatever they need to protect rights that they are entitled to is itself justified, whether it is abortion or something else.

This would be criminal idiocy in any lawyer not affiliated with the “pro-life” movement. By their standards, it’s just typical confusion and ignorance. As for Stanek, no one expects better of her, and she rarely disappoints. In this case, she mischaracterizes the definition of pregnancy used by the reality-based community, derives from her false definition a “logical” conclusion about non-pregnancy that doesn’t even pass the laugh test let alone correspond to reality, and from that attempts to vacate the central holding in Roe (at least in respect of ID&X) by assuming that having a right to abortion precludes having the right to any other procedure that serves the same Constitutional ends without being abortion. This is dumbness piled upon ignorance - in other words, an ordinary day on the right wing - but tiresome for all that. We can only hope the newly-stacked Court has enough self-respect to rise above it.