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