Physician Saves Child From Botched Unlawful Abortion

Dr. Thomas Hilgers is an OB/GYN who was in practice before Roe v. Wade. He trained in medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and then completed his residency at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine.

In 2020, he published a book called The Fake and Deceptive Science Behind Roe v. Wade. It’s an excellent book which calls out Justice Blackmum for ignoring the scientific evidence on when life begins and embracing outdated, false theories about the humanity of preborn children. I highly recommend it.*

A Woman and Baby in Distress

In addition to analyzing the arguments used in Roe, Hilgers wrote about an experience he had as a doctor before the Supreme Court legalized abortion.

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Despite pro-abortion claims that illegal abortions were common before Roe, Hilgers says he only ever encountered one woman in all his years of practice who tried to induce an illegal abortion.

It happened in 1972. A woman who was 18 weeks pregnant came to the emergency room one night with a fever of 103.6° F. She was suffering from abdominal pain and tenderness.

Hilgers writes, “The signs and symptoms – along with the fever – are characteristic of acute chorioamnionitis – an infection that is present in the membranes and within the uterus surrounding the pregnancy.”

The infection was the result of a botched illegal abortion.

A Daring Decision to Save a Life

Hilgers wanted to know whether the baby was still alive. He used a Doppler unit to check for a fetal heartbeat. It showed that the baby’s heart was still beating. He writes:

I honestly didn’t know what to do at that moment. We had been taught – and I might add young doctors are today still being taught this – that the only treatment is to empty the uterus. So, I knew that the approach would be to start by giving her Pitocin, putting her in labor, and, in effect, emptying the uterus. (Hilgers 24)

That would have meant the death of the baby.

Hilgers was faced with a dilemma. He was devoutly pro-life and didn’t want to kill the baby. He knew that the standard of care was to empty the uterus. Most doctors, facing this dilemma, would immediately perform what they would consider a lifesaving abortion.

But the woman’s condition, though serious, was stable, and Hilgers wanted to try to save the baby. He admitted her to the hospital and put her on a high dose of antibiotics, keeping her under close observation.

The next morning, the woman’s fever was gone, and her abdomen was less tender. Hilgers writes, “This gave me some hope that we might be successful with this treatment.”

He continued with the treatment, checking the woman throughout each day. By the ninth or tenth day of her hospitalization, she had recovered. The infection was gone.

Both the woman and the baby had survived.

A Complete Change of Heart

But how did the woman, who had nearly died trying to end her pregnancy, react to still being pregnant?

Remarkably, her heart had softened towards the baby. She changed her mind about aborting.

Hilgers writes:

I could see that her heart was beginning to warm to this baby. When I discharged her, or shortly thereafter at least, she told me that she would be moving to Detroit and the baby would be born there.

Hilgers kept in touch with her, and she gave birth to a full-term, healthy baby girl.

Right before the birth, Hilgers asked the woman what she was going to name her baby, and while he cannot remember the exact name, she told him it meant “looking forward to the baby coming.”

She’d had a complete change of heart.

This mother came to want her baby; all that was needed was a little time. Even though she’d been desperate enough to attempt an illegal abortion, only a few weeks later, she was looking forward to having her daughter.

Research shows that her experience isn’t uncommon. Often, unwanted pregnancies become wanted ones once the option of abortion is no longer on the table.

The Turnaway Study

Surprisingly, this was shown in a study that was widely touted as being pro-abortion.

The Turnaway Study followed women who had abortions and compared them to women who were turned away from abortion facilities for being too far along in their pregnancies. It followed each group of women for five years.

The study’s authors made various claims, including that women don’t regret their abortions. However, the study has major methodological flaws.

Pregnant people were recruited to take part in the study at different abortion clinics. Thousands of women were asked to participate when they arrived for their abortions. Only 27% agreed—the rest didn’t want to be contacted or fill out questionnaires after their abortions.

And by the end of the five years, only 17% of the total number remained in the study. The rest dropped out between the first questionnaire and the last one.

The study, then, started with an unrepresentative sample, comprised of women who felt comfortable enough with their abortion decisions to want to talk about them with strangers afterward.

When women dropped out, there was no attempt to follow up with them. Researchers don’t know why they stopped participating or how they fared afterward. They just disappeared from the results.

The authors asked the remaining women only one question: “Was the decision to have an abortion right for you?” The only possible answers were yes, no, or uncertain. No further questions were asked, and no effort was made to clarify or examine the women’s one-word answers.

The women weren’t asked about their emotions or screened for depression, suicidal thoughts, or substance abuse. They weren’t interviewed or encouraged to talk about their feelings.

Based solely on this single question (and ignoring the 83% of women who declined to be questioned), the authors determined that 95% of the women didn’t regret their abortions. And this statistic was repeated endlessly by the mainstream media, in medical journals, and in various publications.

The researchers don’t know how the women actually felt after their abortions, whether they suffered from grief, depression, or other emotional turmoil.

They don’t know if the women answered honestly, or if they said what they wanted to believe (or what they thought the researchers wanted to hear). No one questioned whether these women, if pro-choice, were concerned about the results of the study, knowing it could impact the legality of abortion, and held back.

The only thing they do know is that 95% of the women wouldn’t say that abortion was the wrong decision for them.

Yet the study’s authors, the media, and most people who cited the study concluded that abortion is a positive good for women and that they don’t suffer emotionally afterward.

The Hidden Finding

But one finding from the Turnaway Study has been virtually ignored.

The researchers also asked the women who were refused abortions and went on to have their babies if they were happy with the outcome.

And it turned out, the overwhelming majority were.

Five years later, 96% believed having the baby was the best possible outcome— a percentage point above those who said abortion was the right choice for them. In other words, they were glad they were turned away.

In fact, the study found that the vast majority of women who were denied an abortion changed their minds about wanting one. Some changed their minds long before they even met their children. Just a week after being denied the abortion, over a third of the women said they no longer wanted one.

Though initially they all tried to get abortions, the overwhelming majority were glad they didn’t succeed. Their unwanted children became wanted ones.

This seems to indicate that most women’s feelings about their pregnancies and their babies change over time, and the vast majority of women adjust when they cannot get abortions.

A Damning Admission

It reminds me of a 1967 article in the pro-abortion magazine Eugenics Quarterly (yes, it was called that), which attempted to find a link between unwanted pregnancies and abused children. The article was trying to advocate for legal abortion.

The author was forced to admit:

There is a contention that unwanted conceptions tend to have undesirable effects… The direct evidence for such a relationship is almost completely lacking, except for a few fragments of retrospective evidence.

It was the hope of this article to find more convincing systematic research evidence and to give some idea of the amount of relationship between unwanted conception and undesirable effect on children. This hope has been disappointed. (E. Pohlman, “Unwanted Conception, Research on Undesirable Consequences” Eugenics Quarterly, volume 14, 1967, p. 143)

Hilgers saved a woman’s baby from abortion, and her mother came to love her—the story has a happy ending.

There is every indication that if more pregnant people were prevented from having abortions, most of their stories would have happy endings, too.

*Since some people have legitimate problems with Amazon’s business practices and want to support other booksellers, instead of linking directly to Amazon for the books I cite in my articles, I’m going to start linking to Goodreads, where, with a few clicks, you can get multiple options for buying.

At Goodreads, you can click on the down arrow next to where the site offers the book on Kindle (on the left) and see a list of other places. You can then expand that list from there to include private online bookstores.

Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and they want to make it easier to buy the book from them (or from AbeBooks, which they also own), so you have to do a little clicking to find the book on those other sites.

Source: Thomas W Hilgers, MD The Fake and Deceptive Science Behind Roe v. Wade (New York: Beaufort Books, 2020) 23, 24 – 25

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.