Michael Knowles: “If you want women to receive basic medical care, you should be calling for a full on abortion pill ban”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

As Media Matters has reported, Donald Trump's presidential campaign is touting the support of Daily Wire host Michael Knowles:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is touting support from one of the most vitriolic critics of IVF in the country: Michael Knowles.

The Daily Wire host has said that in vitro fertilization is a “crime,” “evil,” and “immoral." After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against IVF, he even suggested that IVF doctors should be the target of prosecutions if they continue their work.

The Trump campaign issued a September 4 press release announcing the formation of “Catholics for Trump,” which it called “a coalition committed to safeguarding the vital principles of religious liberty and defending family values that President Donald J. Trump has ardently championed."

Furthermore, as ProPublica reported regarding the story Knowles appears to be discussing (emphasis added):

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

...

Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C. “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

From the September 19, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show

MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): So bereft of opportunities to tout their policy wins. the last thing that Kamala Harris has is to lie and she is lying. They're focusing specifically on abortion. This is the only issue that seems to get Kamala Harris riled up. Sometimes I think it's the only issue she really cares about — it's being able to kill more and more babies each year and she is lying about abortion. She got caught in a major abortion lie yesterday. Kamala Harris tweeted out, a young mother from Georgia should be alive today raising her son and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school. This is exactly what we feared when Roe v. Wade was struck down. In more than 20 states, Trump abortion bans prevent doctors from providing basic medical care.

And the way she's wording this, she's clearly trying to avoid making the direct claim that would be proven as a lie. But I think with all of the insinuation here, this qualifies as a big fat whopper. Kamala Harris is saying a young mother in Georgia was killed because of an abortion ban — because she was not able to abort her child. And what's amazing about this whopper is the opposite is true. This woman who died in Georgia died because she took the abortion pill. The pill that Kamala Harris is touting, that she wants to make more readily available, is what killed this woman. Kamala Harris is insinuating this woman did not have an abortion and that's why she died. She died because she had an abortion. She took the abortion pill and the abortion pill is really dangerous. It's always very dangerous to the baby and almost always kills the baby, so it's almost a 100% lethal in that way. It's also dangerous for the mother who is trying to kill her baby. Why was it dangerous here? Because not all of the baby was expelled, not all of the corpse of the baby was expelled. And so, some of the body parts of the baby were left in the mother's womb and she became septic.

So then she goes to the hospital and the hospital made a bunch of errors here, but there's nothing in any of the the abortion restrictions that would prevent doctors from clearing out a baby who's already been killed. There's nothing about that. Even if the baby had been alive and posed a threat to the health of the mother, the doctors would have no restrictions on them to treat the mother. It's just a complete lie. It's a total inversion of reality.

Abortion killed this woman in Georgia. If you follow the facts of the story in Georgia, you should become much more pro-life. You should advocate for far more restrictive abortion bans and regulations. In this case, it wasn't even just one baby. It was twins actually. And the abortion pill worked in as much as it killed the baby, but it also ended up killing the mother. If you care about women's health, if you want women to receive basic medical care, you should be calling for a full-on abortion pill ban because the majority of abortions now are carried out by pill, and this is obviously extraordinarily dangerous. And it's a policy that Kamala Harris and the Democrats are advocating that killed this woman. Kamala Harris has blood on her hands. The Democrats have a lot of blood on their hands on the issue of abortion, but up to and including the deaths of the mothers. Trump should be should be running on this issue, not Kamala Harris. Republicans can point out — see, look how dangerous these abortion drugs are. Look how dangerous abortion is to the mother.