Pro-abortion ideologues have been known to blame "recall bias" on stories or studies that don't go their way.
But here I believe we have an actual case of pro-abortion recall bias.
Recall that on May 26 liberal online journal Salon published the first person account, "Abortion saved my life," by writer Mikki Kendall. Kendall claimed she almost hemorrhaged to death because a hospital doctor "didn’t do abortions. At all. Ever."
Along with several other people, I questioned many aspects of Kendall's story, particularly her accusation that a physician would stand by and watch a patient die rather than provide life-saving treatment, only because he "decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway," as Kendall wrote.
This was a very serious charge, amounting to gross medical negligence. I pressed Kendall to name the doctor.
And in a follow-up blog post Kendall - who, again, had based her entire Salon piece on the allegation that an anti-abortion doctor refused to commit a life-saving abortion - admitted:
Some say I should name and shame the doctor that refused to do the procedure. If I knew why he refused I might have done just that, but since I know that there are many possible reasons that he did not do it? [sic] I’ve left him to deal with the internal procedures in place.
In other words, Kendall really had no clue why the doctor did not provide the treatment she already had scheduled (more on that in a minute): abortion. She was projecting.
In fact, when Kendall detailed this medical emergency on her blog in real time, in September 2007, she never mentioned she had been mistreated. In fact, she implied the opposite.
Kendall was at that time, as she is now, politicized and racist. She mentioned more than once she planned a career as a lawyer - as recently as a week after her abortion. She also had the wherewithal to go on a grand tirade against her parents for supposedly neglecting her during her medical crisis.
Given all that, Kendall failed to mention being neglected by a doctor during the same medical crisis? Odd. Unlikely.
It turns out Kendall thought she miscarried earlier in the month, on September 6. (See also paragraph 5 here.)
When Kendall experienced bleeding around September 19 she discovered she was still pregnant, speculating with a twin, and opted for an elective dilatation and evacuation abortion after a diagnosis of placental abruption, which she said was scheduled for "next week." If this had been deemed medically necessary, the decision whether or not to abort would not have been left to her:
This scenario was far different than that which Kendall described in her Salon piece:
When the abruption apparently worsened on September 20, it was still not so bad that Kendall called an ambulance. She wanted to bypass the nearest hospital, Provident, which she thought was inferior, so she had her husband drive her. (Minor point, but she also contradicts this in her Salon piece.)
Then Kendall described her hospital care as nothing other than competent, timely, controlled, and even a nonemergency - during the very period of time she later claimed receiving negligent care and almost dying. Kendall also described being cared for by a team of doctors, not a solo anti-abortion nutcase...
Kendall's story on Salon is so far different than her description of events at the time, the two cannot possibly be harmonized....
... So close to death was Kendall that she went home the morning after her midnight abortion, a day earlier than expected.
I again call on Salon to retract Kendall's story. It is at best exaggerated and at worst invented.
[HT for Kendall blog posts: Anonymous L; Kendall photo via her Twitter page]
