The trial I wrote about last week had nothing to do with the ethics of abortion. Sadly. It centered instead on an Arizona state law regulating abortion. When the Supreme Court did an end around the legislative process back in 1973, unilaterally declaring all state abortion bans to be unconstitutional, it thereby spared abortion from having to bear up under much public scrutiny as it wormed its way into the American mainstream. The Court’s ruling also stripped from fathers any legal right to prevent their own children from being torn apart in the womb. For plenty of prospective dads, that was seen as a feature, not a bug. It’s the sex they wanted, not the children. Andrew Klavan recently noted that birth control and abortion have “turned fertile female bodies into sterile sex toys”—a tradeoff perfectly suited to bringing out the worst in male ambition.

Mario Villegas is not the kind of man who sleeps with a woman without any regard for the children he fathers. But even for fathers like Mario, who are married to the mother and vehemently opposed to abortion, it makes no legal difference. If the wife wants to kill their child, there isn’t a single thing the husband can do about it. The loophole in this case was that when the abortion took place in 2018, Arizona required that specific information about abortion be disclosed to the mother as a necessary precursor to obtaining her consent. Since that information was not provided, the abortion of Baby Villegas took place illegally. By definition. Despite Mrs. Villegas’ adamance that she wanted the abortion and despite evidence suggesting that virtually all Arizona abortions take place without any such disclosure. Mario Villegas won his case, and was awarded close to $70,000, but that is small consolation compared to the anguish of losing a child. The presiding judge was adamant that the aborting mother had every right to end the life of their child, no matter how much distress that caused her husband. But because the abortion clinic failed to legally obtain her informed consent, the grieving father was therefore entitled to damages. 

The reason I’m coming back to the case for what is now a third article is because there is one sense in which the case of Baby Villegas vs. Camelback Family Planning did put abortion on trial. How so? By putting two “expert” OB/GYNs on record. One who is vehemently opposed to abortion and one who makes a circuit between Arizona and Nevada—so he can abort children in two states rather than one. One doctor has delivered more than 10,000 babies; the other has performed tens of thousands of abortions. How could he do such a thing? He told us, actually. He doesn’t recognize them as unborn children nor does he recognize them to be alive—despite the fact that, by his own admission, they have a beating heart and are growing. 

Abortion doesn’t kill an unborn child; it removes a pregnancy. That’s how Dr. Paul Isaacson puts it. He claims pregnancy is a term synonymous with "products of conception," though the English language disagrees. Pregnancy is not a physical object to be removed. It is the state of being pregnant—which is the state of “having a child or other offspring developing in the body; with child or young, as a woman or female mammal.” This according to the Random House Dictionary. "Child," you’ll remember is a word Isaacson refuses to use of human beings in the womb, on the assertion that it is not a child until after birth. Random House be damned. Nor does he use the word kill. Because, by his definition, this not-a-child is not alive—despite unequivocal evidence to the contrary.

Anyone who would say under oath that a human embryo is not alive is not a serious or credible doctor. He’s an abortionist, so I don’t want to waste too much time on his testimony, other than to unmask him as an opportunistic scoundrel. Lindsay Clancy is on trial for killing her three born children. Meanwhile, Dr. Isaacson is heralded as an expert witness for having killed tens of thousands of unborn children. Is one killer any better or worse than the other? Some will insist that embryos are smaller than born children and don’t experience fear or pain like born children. But would Mrs. Clancy’s actions have been any less heinous if she’d administered general anesthesia before strangling her children? Would their lives have been any less over? Abortion may not be painful to unborn children early in gestation, but it is not pain that makes murder immoral. It’s the fact that it steals from its victims the rest of their lives. And nobody loses more of their lives than aborted unborn children.

Baby Villegas was medically aborted at 8 weeks gestation. If you’re not sure what the difference is between 8 weeks and 8 weeks gestation, you’re not alone. Back in 2015, I wrote an article titled “Eight Weeks Doesn’t Mean Eight Weeks.” It was in response to a high-profile pro-life pastor who made all sorts of factual misstatements about abortion and prenatal development because he didn’t understand the difference between 8 weeks and 8 weeks gestation. Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, the OB/GYN who testified for the plaintiff explained the difference on the stand:

Fertilization is the initiation of a pregnancy. [But] the problem is that most patients don't remember the exact timing of conception… so that's why historically we've always gone back to the first day of the last menstrual period, which is two weeks prior to conception. So if it had been 7 weeks from the first day of the last menstrual period, technically this baby was conceived (around) 5 weeks ago.

In other words, the victim of an 8-week abortion is a 6-week embryo. Roughly speaking. LMP, which stands for the first day of your last menstrual period, is the more practical way to age a pregnancy, but notice what Dr. Hazelrigg said at the outset of his remarks. It is fertilization that starts the clock on a baby’s life. The reason scientists age embryos and fetuses from conception is because that is the point at which each of our lives begin. It may ease Dr. Isaacson’s conscience to pretend that embryos and fetuses are not alive when he dissects or poisons them, but as Ben Shapiro likes to say, facts don’t care about your feelings. Among the facts conveyed on the ultrasound report of Baby Villegas, were the following, as described by Dr. Hazelrigg:

I saw an ultrasound that was performed within days of the abortion and on the ultrasound report, at least on the images on the ultrasound, it said 7 weeks, 6 days… [I could see that there was] cardiac motion and a yoke sac and it's just one baby… This is a viable intrauterine pregnancy. [This is] very important information [because it tells us this is] not a miscarriage, that there is a heartbeat present… Ultrasonographers and radiologists will use that term, viable, single, intrauterine pregnancy… And of course, what they mean by the word viable is that there is a fetal heart rate present... For a young woman in her 20's (like Mrs. Villegas), who is pregnant and is found to have a 7, almost 8 week pregnancy, with a fetal heart rate, a singleton, meaning just one baby, and no mention of any bleeding of any type, the likelihood of her carrying to term is over 95 percent. The chance of miscarrying (under these conditions) would be less than 3 percent.

Mario Villegas believes that his aborted child was a girl. At one point during his testimony, Dr. Hazelrigg was questioned on this point: 

Attorney: Can you tell from this chart what gender this baby was?

Dr. Hazelrigg. No, I can't.

Attorney: Again, a dumb question, but this baby was a human being; correct?

Dr. Hazelrigg. Yes, absolutely.

Attorney: So when is gender fixed for a human baby?

Dr. Hazelrigg: Gender is fixed at the moment of fertilization. The chromosomes are formed from the sperm and the egg; XX would be female and XY would be male.

Attorney: And can that gender ever be changed?

Dr. Hazelrigg. No.

Though only one player, coach, or owner in the WNBA seems to understand this (Thank you, Sophie Cunningham!), a person’s gender can never be changed. Men cannot become women, and women cannot become men—no matter how many hormones you pump into them or how many body parts you cut off. Dr. Isaacson was not questioned about gender fluidity, but given his propensity to sacrifice facts for feelings (and financial gain), and given the abortion industry’s unequivocal commitment to “helping” boys and girls pretend to switch genders, I suspect he would have dutifully parroted the party line. Or simply pleaded the fifth with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is apparently smart enough to be on the Supreme Court but not smart enough to know what a woman is. 

Among the most enlightening portions of Dr. Hazelrigg’s testimony was when the subject turned to the mechanics of medical abortion. This, of course, is the future of abortion both in the United States and around the globe. Every year, a greater percentage of abortions are performed with pills rather than surgical instruments. By Guttmacher’s latest estimate, for 2023, 63% of U.S. abortions are performed medically. No doubt it’s already higher now as we move closer and closer to a future in which there are no abortion clinics, but there are abortion pills flooding our mailboxes. What is a medical abortion, precisely? Dr. Hazelrigg tells us:

Mifepristone is also known as RU486. And it's given as an abortifacient because it's a potent progesterone antagonist, meaning that it blocks the progesterone receptors, [lowering] progesterone in the mother's body. And [progesterone] is the hormone in early pregnancy that supports the implantation of the baby into the wall of the uterus and the blood vessels that form to eventually become the placenta… [The placenta] form(s) in the late first trimester. So until about 12 or 13 weeks, there's a cyst on one of the ovaries that provides the (needed) progesterone until the placenta takes over as the progesterone factory in the second trimester.

Dr. Hazelrigg was then asked how the baby get nutrients and oxygen from the mother's blood early in pregnancy. This was his response:

Progesterone is being produced by this corpus luteum cyst in the ovary, and the progesterone enables that vascularity, the blood vessels on the inner lining of the uterus, to interact with this implanting embryo to form [an] interface that allows the nutrients from the mother to be transferred to the early developing embryo. And that's how the Mifepristone causes the baby to die. It cuts off that progesterone supply and doesn't allow nutrients to flow to the baby… It will take a couple days (to work)… The baby essentially suffocates… [Even though] this baby's not breathing air… the only source of oxygen and nutrients that this baby has is from the mother, from the inner lining of the uterus and the blood flow going through the uterus into the early embryo. (When) that's cut off, the baby essentially suffocates (and starves).

This, of course, is just the first half of a medical abortion. A second drug is necessary to expel the tiny dead baby. And while the first drug wreaks havoc on the baby’s body, the second does a number on the mom. That one is called misoprostol, or Cytotec, which Dr. Hazelrigg describes as “a potent uterotonic medicine [that] causes the uterus to contract strongly.” Based on many of the testimonies I’ve read from women who have gone threw it, that is something of an understatement. “The worst pain of my life” is a description I’ve heard with some frequency. And then there’s the blood. “Adult diapers would have been more suitable than maxi pads.” That’s how one woman put it. “I [thought] I could deal with the pain,” she said, “(but) I was wrong. Even when the painkillers did work, I still felt like I was going to die.” Just for comparison’s sake, this is how Dr. Isaacson said he would explain a medical abortion to a woman who was 8 weeks pregnant:

I would tell her that the embryo is approximately half-an-inch long. That it has an extremely primitive from of a heart that is not fully formed or fully functional, but is contracting. That there are arms and legs that are not fully formed. And I would tell her that at 8 weeks, she's 16 weeks away from where a fetus is able to feel pain and 16 weeks away from where a fetus is usually considered viable or capable of living outside of the uterus… I would tell her that at her next visit we'd be giving her a pill called Mifeprex or mifepristone and that pill is designed to essentially stop further development of the pregnancy. And it prepares the pregnancy to be easily expelled by the uterus. But by itself it doesn't make the uterus expel the pregnancy, so at home at a time that's convenient for her between 24 and 48 hours after taking the Mifeprex, she'll take a second medication called misoprostol. I would tell her that a few hours after taking the misoprostol, she'll begin having cramping and bleeding. Once that cramping and bleeding begins, it may go on on average for two to six hours, but it could be longer. And that at some point she should expel the pregnancy and when she does, the cramping and bleeding typically diminish. But it would be normal for her to have some light bleeding for several weeks afterwards.

We have now heard two different Arizona doctors describe, under oath, the same medication abortion in drastically different terms. So how do we determine which one is telling the truth and which one is telling a lie? Here’s how I’d go about it. I’d ask first if there is anything in either testimony that is objectively false? For instance, did either man make the claim that, say, human embryos and fetuses are not alive? Despite the fact that they are growing and have a beating heart? That would be one way to establish the relative credibility of each man. Or how about this? Does either man financially benefit from the position they’ve taken? Does Dr. Hazelrigg make any money by refusing to do abortions? Or does Dr. Isaacson make any money by being willing to fly back and forth between two states to perform tens of thousands of abortions? If we could figure out if either man is more truthful than the other, or if either man is personally enriching himself through the position he’s taken on abortion, we just might be able to figure out whether abortion is a noble and philanthropic form of health care, or whether it is a despicable act of violence that kills the most innocent and helpless members of the human community.