We recently had the opportunity to speak with our longtime friend, Dr. Brent Boles. Dr. Brent Boles has practiced medicine for 28 years and ran his own OBGYN practice in Nashville, Tennessee. He joins us today for some Q & A to debunk and destroy three of the most deceptive talking points and lies of pro-abortion advocates.
This conversation has been edited from the full version of the podcast for clarity and length.
How could pro-choicers argue that abortion is safer than childbirth?
They are making that statement - that maternal mortality, that pregnancy related deaths will increase if abortions are made illegal. They're making that statement based on their inaccurate and false conclusion that abortion is safer than childbirth. If you want to be able to say that and look objectively at the data, there's only one way to do it.
And that's to take death certificates and link them to any intervention for pregnancy whether it's pregnancy care, a delivery, an abortion, care for a miscarriage, or medical care provided for an ectopic. You have to look at death certificates and link them to any kind of pregnancy care, and then, and then sort out whether or not there was an abortion, or there was a pregnancy-related mortality or there was a delivery-related complication.
If you don't do that, you're not comparing apples to oranges. You're not even comparing apples to watermelons. I mean, you're not talking about the same things. And that's one of the things the CDC said: we use these two statistics for different public health purposes. So, you can't link those together. And the only study they have was a study produced by doctors, Raymond and Grimes that came out in 2012. They concluded that a delivery is 14 times more likely to result in a maternal death than an abortion. They had accurate maternal mortality statistics. They did not have accurate abortion statistics. The two statistics they used were not determined the same way. And they didn't link death certificates across the board.
You have mentioned that other countries in Europe have linked death certificates to the treatments for pregnancy. So, did you want to talk about that a little bit as just a case example, illustrating the falsehood of this claim that abortion is safer than childbirth?
The health care is delivered differently in most countries in Europe than it is here. And with all the disadvantages that go along with a centralized system of healthcare provision like that, one of the advantages is they have a centralized database of statistics. So, researchers in Finland and in other countries in Europe have been able to link death certificates with any intervention during pregnancy.
And there are at least six studies, six published papers, and they all agree. They all agree, abortion is more likely to result in a mortality than delivery. In fact, the best paper in that group says that you are four times more likely to die from an abortion than you are for delivering a child. And those are statistics calculated by linking the death certificates to any intervention during pregnancy, whether it's a delivery, care for prenatal care, care for a complicated pregnancy, or someone who has an elective abortion.
So, it looks at the death certificates and pulls that data, and links it. So, when you do the study the right way, when you analyze the data in the correct manner, it's clear, it confirms what you and I have as a common-sense perception, that the things that you have to do to abort a baby are not safe, definitely not safe for the baby. And they're also not safe for the mother.
Not just the risk of mortality, but the risks of damage to the cervix contributing to preterm labor. Women who've had two or more abortions are far more likely to deliver an extremely premature baby in a future pregnancy. And prematurity is an extreme cause of morbidity and mortality in newborns.
So, there's so many public health things that these blanket statements throw out, that “abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth” and “taking a medication abortion pill is safer than Tylenol”, and all the medical studies show - It is simply not true. And it's not defensible.
Can you explain why the adverse events related to the abortion pill are often not reported? And why the abortion pill is actually much more dangerous for women than the industry is claiming?
Well, because the statistics, the information that's available depends upon the abortion industry to self-report, to acknowledge the problems they have. That's like asking the embezzler to file an accurate accounting report. It's not going to happen.
The abortion pill was first approved in 2000. And there were restrictions placed upon it because it was very important. For the next few minutes, let's just do something that pro-lifers have a hard time doing, and let's forget about the baby. Let's just only talk about the women's safety issues because that's what the industry is arguing for here: that they're safe for women. So, let's just concentrate on that for a few minutes. From the initial approval, the FDA put several restrictions on the prescribing of Mifeprex, the abortion pill.
Then, they instituted upon it what's called a REMS or a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy. So, I didn't really know what that was. So, I decided to look it up and figure out. Exactly what does that mean? And how many drugs in the United States are considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant a REMS imposition upon them?
There are over 20,000 pharmaceutical products, prescription products that are available in the United States, name brand and generic, over 20,000. Only 57 of them currently have a REMS restriction up on their use, only 57 out of over 20,000, and one of those is Mifeprex. Because if you use it in a pregnancy that's farther along than the recommendation, the patient is much more likely to have an incomplete process to develop an infection, to have hemorrhage that requires a blood transfusion or further surgery.
And women have died from those kinds of complications. And if the person is not evaluated in-person by physical exam or ultrasound to confirm that the pregnancy is not an ectopic - one that develops in the fallopian tube or outside of the uterus in the abdomen, rather than inside the uterus- if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, and is given Mifeprex, then, when she gets the early warning signs that her ectopic is about to cause problems, she calls the abortion provider and she's told, "Oh, honey, that cramping is normal. That pain is normal. Everybody goes through it, you'll get over it," and then, they hang up on her.
So, as her pain increases and her tubal pregnancy gets closer to rupturing and causing her to bleed to death from the inside, she sits at home thinking, "Oh, well, they told me this is normal." And so, there's that danger. And if you look at the number of pregnancies that are ectopic; and I did this calculation once, if you look at the number of pregnancies that are ectopic, and you look at where the abortion industry wants to be with mail order abortions, you would six or more ectopic pregnancies per day, rupturing in the United States for women who were given abortion pills via the postal service instead of getting a minute in-person evaluation; six a day!
And the abortion industry says, when they talk about illegal abortions, "Even one death from illegal abortion is too many. That's why we can't go back to illegal abortions." Well, how about one death from a legal abortion being too many? And they happen.
Maybe someone says, "Okay. All right. Fine. I'll be a moderate pro-choicer. I'll grant that, sure. We need to have the in-person evaluations just to rule out ectopic pregnancies, and to diagnose the gestational age of the pregnancy.” But then, they'll say, "But assuming that, it's actually very safe. As long as you can make sure the woman doesn't have an ectopic pregnancy. And as long as you can make sure it's taken between when she finds out she's pregnant and 10 weeks, then, it's totally safe, it's safer even than Tylenol." So, what's wrong with that assertion, even given the in-person evaluation?
One of the requirements that the FDA imposed when they approved this medication 21 years ago, was that Danco, the manufacturer, and that any future manufacturer report to the FDA any adverse events, even mild ones. But the manufacturer is dependent on two things. One, the manufacturer has to get a report from the abortion provider that there was a complication.
How many abortion providers are compliant with that? We don't know because no state is allowed to go in and audit records, or inspect clinics. Every time you try, as a state legislature to impose accountability on the abortion industry, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood trot it out to a friendly judge in federal court and get it blocked. So, the abortion clinic, as far as information goes, is a great, big black hole.
We don't know what goes on inside. And we don't know how many are compliant with these reporting statistics. But then, what I've also seen in many years of private practice is that more than half of the women who come back to their private OB-GYN to seek care after an abortion are having a problem, and they never went back to their abortion provider because they felt too creepy about going back.
They didn't want to go back. They didn't have a good feeling. Or maybe they called the Planned Parenthood facility or the other non-Planned Parenthood abortion provider. And on their phone calls, they were blown off. So, the women who have complications, they're not always going back to the abortion provider. So, the abortion provider doesn't even know if he was going to report.
He doesn't know that it happened because they never come back to see them again. And in fact, there was a study that was just released a review of adverse events by the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNS that showed that two-thirds of the women requiring surgery to treat complications from medication abortions had that surgery provided by a physician that was not an abortion provider. So that means that two-thirds of the moderate and severe complications that happen that require surgery - the women are not getting the care from the abortion provider, who supposedly is an advocate for women.
In that case, the abortion provider wouldn't have any of the data from the surgeries or complications that follow the use of the abortion pill, to report to the FDA anyways, assuming that they are reporting it. So, you're saying that there could be upwards of 66%, or so, of women with complications following adverse effects, following use of the abortion pill or medication abortion that are completely not included in the statistics to the FDA so that they can make sense of what kind of repercussions come from the medication abortion?
Correct. With the numbers, they're so skewed in how they're reported. Many of those adverse events were not reported to Danco by the abortion provider. They were reported by the emergency room where the woman sought treatment or by the private gynecologist that provided the treatment. They weren't all reported by the abortion providers. So, that that's how we know about that large volume of patients who had to receive emergency care from a physician that was not their abortion provider.
And that's another reason why states have tried to impose requirements that abortion providers have privileges at a hospital so that they can meet their patient at the hospital and take care of them themselves. But they don't want to do that. So, they don't get privileges. So, they can't be called and bothered.
A universal experience that emergency room physicians have, and I've had this confirmed to me by several emergency room doctors in different parts of the country, is that when a patient presents to the emergency room after having had an abortion and a complication, you can't get that abortion provider on the phone to get any information about what they did, how the procedure went, whether there were problems during the procedure. You can't even get information, much less care and help. Abortion clinics are not advocates for women. They're advocates for abortion.
I want to get to one other point on the abortion pill. Abortion advocates will actually say that the abortion reversal pill is dangerous. And that if you really care for women's health, the woman actually needs to finish the abortion regimen, Mifepristone and Misoprostol; she needs to go through both of those because disrupting that sequence and that regimen with the abortion reversal pill is actually going to be more dangerous. And this is based off of a study that we've talked about before by Mitchell Creinin. Can you talk a little bit about that? But also, how this study is completely fake and false, how they claimed that the reversal pill is more dangerous than the abortion pill itself for the woman taking it?
Yes. Your listeners need to understand how medication abortion works. There's a hormone produced first by the ovary and then by the placenta that is vital to the success of a pregnancy. And you've heard of it, it's called progesterone. Mifeprex is a progesterone blocker. So that when a woman takes a pill of Mifeprex to begin a medication abortion, her body then behaves as if there is no progesterone in her system, temporarily.
And what that does is it disrupts the placenta, deprives the baby of fluid and oxygen and nutrition, so that the baby is harmed and usually dies. And then, a second pill is given two to three days later that causes the uterus to cramp as if they are in labor to expel the baby and the tissue that's associated with the pregnancy.
Dr. Creinin, you mentioned, he's an abortion provider, attempted to design a study that he wanted to prove that efforts to reverse medication abortion were not effective, and that they were not safe. And his study achieved neither of those goals. And I really believe that's why they stopped the study early. They claimed that they stopped study early because too many women were having to go to the emergency room for bleeding.
But the only women in their study who went to the emergency room for bleeding and had to get blood or surgery, or both, were the women in the study who took the Mifeprex but did not get progesterone. Before they stopped the study, examining every woman in the study who got progesterone as part of the study, more than 80% of them, it was successful, and they still had living babies and no bleeding.
You're saying the only study that is used to try to discredit the abortion reversal pill which saves babies, stopped early because too many women had to go to the hospital because they were bleeding or hemorrhaging. But the very women who got the most harmed were the ones who didn't take the progesterone, who didn't take the abortion reversal pill?
Yes. They split their patients. Half of them took Mifeprex and a placebo, half of them took Mifeprex and progesterone. The only women who required surgery or who had so much bleeding, they needed a blood transfusion, were in the placebo group. None of the women in the progesterone group needed blood transfusions, and none of them needed surgery. And more than 80% of them had living babies at the top of their post-study evaluation.
Help us think through this lie and myth, Dr. Brent that abortion is necessary, and we all ought to get on board with abortions if the pregnancy is threatening the mother's life.
So, obstetricians end pregnancies all the time to save the life of the mother, to protect the health of the mother, we do it all the time. When a woman is premature, and she's developed severe high blood pressure issues, we deliver the baby, and ending the pregnancy cures her. When she goes into preterm labor, we allow the pregnancy to deliver. We take care of them.
When their diabetes is out of control, or maybe they have epilepsy, and they have worsening seizures, or perhaps they have lupus, and they're in kidney failure. There's all kinds of things we take care of, that 50 and 60 years ago, we didn't know what to do with and didn't know how to take care of them. We take care of them. What do you do in those situations, when the mother's life is in danger? You take care of her. It's that simple.
Because abortion may be the easy way out and the way to make a quick buck, for the doctor that tells you that's your best option. But it is rarely the case. So, how many times have I had to deliver a pregnancy that was so early, the child had no chance of survival or know that the mother was going to die if I didn't do that? How many times?
One time. In almost thirty years. And she was a young woman at only 21 or 22 weeks had developed an extremely unusual, very severe case of high blood pressure that had put her in heart failure and kidney failure, and blood could no longer clot, and I mean she was actively dying. And even then, we didn't put her through a procedure that put her at extra risk.
What we did was to induce labor with some very strong medications. Sadly, the child did not survive the labor process and was born intact, but born naturally vaginally intact, and the woman recovered. But doing a procedure on her to end that pregnancy that would have been done the way abortionists do procedures would have killed her.
Anyy procedure on a critically ill woman that doesn't need to be done only adds to her risk. If a woman's life is in danger, deliver the baby the most safe way possible. The only purpose of a late-term abortion is to ensure that the baby is fully dead before it's fully delivered. That's the only purpose of a late-term abortion because good obstetrics allows you to end the pregnancy in a way that's safe for the mother and as safe as possible for the child.
Even in the highest risk pregnancies, the solution is not to kill the baby through an abortion, that you can just deliver the baby early through a cesarean section or through inducing early labor. And then, on top of that, that's actually safer for the mother than an abortion?
Yes. And it's safer for the mother because that occurs in the setting of a hospital, which has a blood bank and has lab, and has an intensive care unit, and has other physicians if she develops a heart problem and you need a cardiologist to help you. Or she develops a lung problem and you need a pulmonologist to help you. You have all those things in a hospital when you're providing good obstetric care.
We are increasingly hearing from pro-lifers and pro-choicers that we should vote for Democrats because their policies address the underlying causes of what allows abortion to thrive in the first place, and that therefore real pro-lifers should vote BLUE. How do we begin thinking through this myth and lie?
When the abortion industry says anything at all that is true, you need to look at the whole context. You need to look at every other piece of information that comes with it.
So, they said that under Democratic presidents, the number of abortions done annually has steadily declined. That is true. But it is not the whole truth, and is not the nothing-but-the-truth. There is so much more to that picture than just that one simple statement, one statistic cherry-picked, and not shown in its complete context. You also have to understand why that was happening, to understand the whole picture.
So, the history of it is abortion becomes legal in all 50 states by Supreme Court fiat in 1973, forced down our throats in an unconstitutional Supreme Court decision. That was the worst Supreme Court decision in history, comparable to the Dred Scott decision in 1957 that said that Black people weren't people and can be treated like property. Roe v. Wade says unborn people aren't people and can be treated like property.
So, they're the same decisions, bigoted against human being because of immutable characteristics that cannot be helped by that human being. The unborn baby can't help it that it's small. A Black person can't help that they were born black. But those two Supreme Court decisions discriminate against them. So, that's what happened in 1973. So, abortions became legal in all 50 states and of course, the number skyrocketed. Abortions peaked during the administration of Jimmy Carter, still very recent on the heels of Roe v. Wade.
When they say abortions have been decreasing under Democratic administrations, they never talked about how it spiked an increase massively under Jimmy Carter, who was a Democrat.
Yes. And that was happening because all of a sudden, it's legal. So, everybody can get in on the game, and everybody can profit from it if they want to do it. So, abortion clinics sprung up all over the place. And they were unregulated. So, that's when abortions peaked. But then, every administration since then, not just the Democrats, not just Clinton and Obama, but every administration, Reagan, first-Bush, Clinton, second-Bush, Obama, Trump: all steady decrease.
Steady decrease in the number of abortions performed. And I believe there are two reasons. One, the conscience of the nation was ignited when ultrasounds became widely available. The other major reason that abortion clinics or that abortion numbers have decreased, is that there are more people out there in the profession either their vocation or their volunteer time, who are working to be sure that women know the truth. That men and women who are facing an unplanned pregnancy, know that they have options. And they know that they can see the baby. They can they can know the truth from somebody who's going to tell them the unvarnished truth. And that doesn't happen in abortion clinics where the sales pitch is worse than a bad used car salesman.
They say that the reason why abortion has been decreasing is thanks to Democrats. And so, they'll say, "You're raising more awareness. You're helping people prevent unplanned pregnancies, and therefore you have less abortions." How do we think through that? Do you think that that's actually why the abortion rate has decreased?
No, it's not. Even prior to the Affordable Care Act that was passed in 2010, and began to be fully implemented in 2014, long before that, access to affordable contraception was so amazingly good. There are over 20,000 federally qualified health centers across the country where a woman who doesn't have insurance and can't afford it, can go and get free birth control pills.
And that doesn't include the county health departments in virtually, every county of every state across the nation. So, access to birth control was better in the 1990s, in the 2000s, than it's ever been in the history of the world. So, you could get it at the health department. You could get it in a federally qualified health center. If you did have a doctor that you saw that would prescribe, there were generic birth control pills available for less than 10 bucks a month.
So, access to contraception improved a little bit after the Affordable Care Act went through. But that's not what's been responsible for the decline in abortions. That decline began in 1980, during the administration of Ronald Reagan, 30 years before the Affordable Care Act. And that's the first real Democratic policy that had an impact on contraception. So, no, it's disingenuous to claim that... it's disingenuous to repeat it when you don't know the full facts and just repeat it like parrot.
It's an outright lie to just promote it when you know better and when you know the truth. But that's what we see from the other side. So, no, I do not buy it. And then, when you look at not just what they say, but what they do. When a Democratic administration reinstates American funding for abortions around the world so that the tens of millions of abortions that are performed internationally, many of them are subsidized by American dollars.
When you restore funding that was cut from abortion clinics that refuse to separate their abortion industry from their birth control programs, when you restore that, you're not trying to decrease it. You're trying to increase it. When you want to pass laws to strengthen Roe, you're not trying to decrease abortions. You're trying to increase it. And it's just mind-numbingly stupid.
Do you have any closing thoughts for us or for our listeners during this politically propitious moment?
Well, just to expand on what you were just saying that the law is a teacher. Just because something is legal doesn't make it right. Slavery was legal. It was legal to refuse to allow women to vote and only allow men to vote. Child labor was legal. Segregation was legal. There are so many things that were legal but wrong. And we have righted those wrongs. Just because abortion is legal, doesn't make it right. And it doesn't make it moral.
Seth Gruber
Seth Gruber is the West Coast Director of Life Training Institute, and a professional pro-life speaker. Seth speaks in schools, churches, pregnancy resource center banquets, and conferences equipping people to defend life and engage the culture! He is also the host of UnAborted with Seth Gruber, a pro-life podcast that translates pro-abortion rhetoric into reality and equips listeners to defend life!