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Jonathan Turley’s disingenuous bloviating for right-wing media outlets who continue to let him cosplay as a relevant scholar has left him little more than a pull-toy. Just feed him a loony legal premise and give him some makeup and he’s ready to say everything from comical nonsense about Martin Luther King to bungling of basic concepts that could be cleared up with cursory research.
But now he’s decided to cross the line into putting people directly in harms way, playing cynical word games with abortion statutes and actively encouraging women in states with abortion bans to hold off on medical treatment based on a combination of his own amateur medical know-how and legal analysis unmoored from practical reality.[1]
In a piece at Fox News (naturally), Turley notes:
After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a common rallying cry for pro-choice advocates has been the endangerment of women with ectopic pregnancies who would now be barred in some states banning or severely limiting abortion services.
This is a common rallying cry because it has the benefit of being a very serious concern. Jonathan Turley wants Fox’s viewers to ignore the risk of dead women piling up by telling you that actually those women probably do still have the right to treatment… on paper!
This is reflected in some of the most restrictive laws. Oklahoma’s law, for example, expressly states, “An act is not an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose to… remove an ectopic pregnancy.” Texas, Louisiana and other states have the same express exemption. However, even if the law were silent on ectopic pregnancies, it is doubtful that the courts would ignore the medical and factual classifications to treat such emergency procedures as abortions or ignore that the mother’s life is in danger from such pregnancies.
“It is doubtful the courts would ignore.” Well, based on that rock-solid grounding, I guess women should just breathe easy! While Turley handwaves away all the states that don’t have explicit ectopic caveats, he ignores that medical professionals he’s talking about hypothetically are in reality confused as to the scope of the exceptions. From Time:
The confusion is already affecting patient care, according to anecdotal reports. Tammi Kromenaker, director of North Dakota’s only abortion clinic (which she soon plans to relocate to Minnesota), says she has already fielded questions from doctors in North Dakota who are worried about treating patients with ectopic pregnancies or incomplete miscarriages, during which the body doesn’t expel all pregnancy-related tissue. As of July 28, providers in North Dakota could be sentenced to five years in prison for providing an abortion, except in cases of rape or incest or when the pregnant person’s life is at risk.
Jonathan Turley isn’t a doctor, but he plays one on TV and he has some medical advice for anyone worried about these laws.
When a pregnancy implants in the fallopian tube, it is not a viable pregnancy but it creates a potentially fatal risk for the mother from tubal rupture and internal bleeding. Removing such a pregnancy is not an abortion. Indeed, as noted in a recent column, the procedures are vastly different, including the fact that “mifepristone and misoprostol, used commonly to provide medical abortions, specifically do not treat a pregnancy outside of the uterus.”
Oh, mifepristone and misoprostol aren’t used in these procedures? Well, methotrexate sure is and we’ve already got pharmacists refusing to fill those prescriptions even in states where the drug is technically legal for this purpose. That’s happening because the pharmacists — correctly — fear that they’re going to get investigated for even stepping down that road.
One woman in Texas was told that she had to drive fifteen hours to New Mexico to have her ectopic pregnancy—which is nonviable, by definition, and always dangerous to the mother—removed.” That is based on a story from 2021, before the Dobbs decision, and an account from an abortion hotline of a doctor refusing to deal with an ectopic pregnancy. It is not explained how such a procedure, even when Roe v. Wade was still good law, could be denied under Texas law.
Once again I’m torn as to whether Turley is a destructive attention-seeking grifter or a complete moron. Honestly, this question keeps me up at night.
Because he writes “it is not explained how…” meaning his addled brain at least considered the disconnect between something being technically legal and yet doctors still not doing it. But then he just rhetorically shrugs like this was a mere brain hiccup or the last vestige of his legal mind making its last, desperate scream before being tamped back down by the old world demon that seized his mind long ago.
Either way.
Yet, the fact that this story predates Dobbs supercharges the argument: whether or not the law protects women on paper, doctors have and continue to show that they’re not willing to risk the uncertainty. Hence the concern over the ectopic pregnancies.
However, President Biden and other Democratic members have called for censorship because social media companies are “killing people” with disinformation. That is precisely what could occur if women believe the claims of politicians and pundits on these ectopic pregnancies.
Full credit for finding a way to throw a nod to the anti-vaxxers.
The most generous read of Turley’s article is that, he really believes that every doctor is going to read these statutes as protecting this specific treatment and every local prosecutor elected on a platform of “stopping baby murder” isn’t going to drag every procedure through a criminal inquest and every insurance company will feel comfortable covering it while the local politicians scream about liability for aiding and abetting abortions. In that world, yes, patients with an ectopic pregnancy in these states should feel fine staying where they are and seeking treatment.
However, over here in the real world, that’s just not happening and — in a textbook example of Freudian projection — Turley’s article is quite dangerous and putting women at tremendous risk.
But, hey, he got to be on TV! And in the end, isn’t that all that really matters?
[1] For the purposes of this article, we’re using the term “women” as that covers the majority of cases, but we recognize that this doesn’t actually capture the full universe of people capable of having an ectopic pregnancy.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
