Ohio’s latest anti-abortion bill is based on false science

An anti-abortion bill introduced to Ohio’s General Assembly on November 14 is causing controversy for requiring doctors to exhaust every possible option to save an unborn fetus, including “re-implanting” an ectopic pregnancy — a procedure that is literally medically impossible.

Colleen Denny, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at NYU Langone Health, explained to The Cut that an ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. This incorrect implantation means the egg has no chance of growing into a baby, but it can endanger the life of the woman if left untreated. The only option is to get rid of the egg either medically or, if the case is extreme, surgically. Denny elaborates that “Once a pregnancy has implanted in some kind of tissue, you can’t move it or put it into a different place. You can’t cut off its blood supply and then put it where you want it to be. It just doesn’t work.” 

It’s upsetting that this medically impossible procedure was included in a bill for many reasons, but it’s particularly insulting to the people who have had to endure the agony that comes with ectopic pregnancies, which constitute about 20 in every 1,000 pregnancies in North America. As one woman, Lisa, told Cosmopolitan, “it is profoundly dangerous to suggest that an ectopic pregnancy can be transplanted.” She continued, “It is a slap in the face to suggest that women choose to end ectopic pregnancies.” 

These dangerously false characterizations of female anatomy and medical reality by politicians are not new, however. For example, in 2012, then-Missouri Representative Todd Aikin said women could not get pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape” because their bodies could “shut the whole thing down.” In 2018, The Guardian reported that Iowa Senator Jodi Ernst used an example of a baby who was born at 22 weeks and survived as evidence that a fetus is viable earlier in a pregnancy than previously thought — but that outcome is the medical exception rather than the rule. Citing data from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the article reports that babies born at 22 weeks have only 1% chance of survival and, even when they do survive, are at high risk for health issues like cerebral palsy. 

As Marie Solis points out in her VICE article, the science anti-choice activists and politicians like Ernst have used to prop up their movement ignores scientific evidence that contradicts their perspective. Abortion provider Carley Zeal explained to Solis, "the National Academy of Sciences, which is a nonpartisan scientific group, affirmed in their report on abortion safety that abortion is safe and effective in all forms and that same report found that the biggest threat to quality of abortion care is the litany of medically unnecessary precautions that raise costs and delay procedures." 

It’s important to call out and correct false claims like the ones this latest Ohio bill makes. It’s important in this specific case to raise awareness about the medical reality of ectopic pregnancies. But it also remains abundantly clear that the bill’s writers never had any interest in factual accuracy. When pressed to back up the bill’s stance on ectopic pregnancies, Ohio Rep. John Becker cited two purely anecdotal and unreliable studies, one of which was published in 1917. Ultimately, the provision is the extreme result of people who view false claims about both science and female anatomy as a means to further their own views. Detached from objective reality, they mutilate logic and facts to such extremes that they cease to be facts at all.