On Monday night, the new ABC medical drama series, The Good Doctor, told the story of a woman with a high-risk pregnancy determined to give birth to her baby despite doctors’ recommendations that she abort.
The episode ended, against all odds, with a successful, life-affirming outcome. How refreshing, in an age when pro-abortion storylines are so frequently worked into television scripts, to see a pro-life message win out.
The Good Doctor revolves around the surgical residency of Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore), a pediatric surgeon who is both autistic and has savant syndrome. He is an intellectual genius who has trouble interacting normally in social settings and with his colleagues at St. Bonaventure Hospital in San Jose, California.
In this episode, titled “Pipes,” a 36-year-old woman who is 22 weeks pregnant, with a history of three miscarriages, is brought in for an ultrasound of the baby. The woman’s pregnancy is a high-risk one—she has antiphospholipid syndrome and this is further complicated by the fact that the baby has a growing tumor on its tailbone.
Upon seeing that the tumor has now grown to half the size of the baby, the attending surgeon, Dr. Melendez (Nicholas Gonzalez), recommends that the pregnancy be “terminated.”
He determines that the baby would not survive long enough to be viable (although in real life, babies have been born just before 22 weeks and survived) because the tumor monopolizes the blood supply and weakens the baby’s heart. But the patient, Barbara, refuses to abort her baby.
The baby has to be taken out of the uterus to perform the surgery and remove the tumor and then placed back into the uterus for the rest of the pregnancy. The show presents the concerns of the hospital board about liability with the risky surgery and high-risk patient.
Meanwhile, the husband starts to object to the procedure and a question comes up about the father’s parental rights to refuse an operation on his unborn child. One board member states the obvious, “Once the fetus is removed from the uterus, one could argue that it becomes a child.” But is told, “That’s ridiculous!”
Of course, it was always a child. And this case exposes exactly why the pro-choice goalposts of when a baby “becomes” a baby keep moving as scientific and medical advances make the age of viability shorter and the options to open the womb and operate to correct fetal abnormalities increase.
Fortunately, the board came to their senses and the surgery was approved. The operation starts but the patient goes into cardiac arrest before it can be completed. Barbara is eager to try it again when she wakes up to find that the surgery was stopped.
Her husband, who was hesitant to agree that she should go through the risky surgery in the first place, says he now fully supports her, and the hospital board comes together again because the operation has become far more life-threatening.
Suddenly the “my body, my choice” rhetoric is tossed out the window and veered into an awful place when Dr. Melendez suggests telling Barbara they are doing the fetal surgery, but then performing an abortion on the woman without her consent.
He tries to justify it by asking, “You wouldn’t lie to convince a suicidal person to climb down off the ledge?” Thank goodness everyone else objects to how wrong, unethical, and illegal that would be.
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To stop Barbara from going into cardiac arrest again, the team comes up with the idea to put her on a bypass machine, and she and the baby come through the surgery safely.
Wouldn’t it be nice if after all that Dr. Melendez stopped to think, “Wow, if the patient had taken my advice, her baby would be dead right now and we never would have been pushed to come up with these amazing life-saving procedures!”
This episode was much like one from Grey’s Anatomy last season when a terminally ill mother was aggressively steered toward getting an abortion, too, but she refused until doctors finally accommodated her.
Just in case you find yourself saying, “Give me a break, it’s just a TV show, this stuff doesn’t happen in real life!” you need to read the amazing story of Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.).
She refused her doctor’s recommendation to get an abortion after her unborn baby was discovered to have Potter’s Syndrome, a fatal condition where the child had no kidneys. Instead she fought for her baby and tried other doctors and experimental treatments until her baby girl became the first ever to survive birth without kidneys.
Now the treatment is saving the lives of other children with the condition. It’s sickening to think about how many other babies have been killed because doctors didn’t know of any alternatives or didn’t want to try.
Abortion is not an option for those of us who are pro-life, but even for those who are pro-choice abortion should always be the very last resort, after all possible medical solutions are pursued for saving both lives, instead of the first recommendation.
The left is always trying to use TV to normalize abortion as “basic healthcare,” wouldn’t it be wonderful if these storylines inspired women and doctors to push for better healthcare for unborn babies?
Every day, women are pressured into abortion due to terminal prenatal diagnoses or other stressful circumstances. However, nobody should be told abortion is their only option.
Instead, let’s join together to make sure people in unexpected pregnancy situations are supported and loved so they can make life-affirming choices for their children.
We’re asking pro-lifers around the country to help us end the pressure surrounding abortion once and for all. Sign our pledge today!
This article was originally published on NewsBusters and was written by Karen Townsend and Alexa Moutevelis Coombs.
