Ryan Hamilton went on CBS News and told a heartbreaking story, claiming his wife was denied care for a miscarriage in Texas due to the Texas law against abortion.

He claims that he went to two different medical facilities after his baby died, and neither of them would do a D&C to remove the dead baby because they were too afraid to violate Texas’ pro-life law.

First, Ryan Hamilton says, she was denied care at SharePoint Emergency Center. Then, the couple went to another hospital, which he refused to name.

If it were true, it would be horrifying. But there are two things to consider.

For one, the actual story has changed several times, and there are inconsistencies in the different versions of it.

For another, there are logical inconsistencies as well.

First, here is the interview:

We’ll start with the logical inconsistencies.

Ryan Hamilton says that his wife was denied care because doctors were unwilling to perform an abortion due to the law. But even though his story seems to change a little every time he tells it (which I’ll point out in a minute), in every version, he has said that she was given abortion-causing drugs as soon as she showed up at the first facility, Sharepoint Emergency Center.

The CBS interviewer states that on the first visit, “Hamilton’s wife was prescribed misoprostol, a drug that induces labor and is used for both miscarriages and abortions.”

So she was given an abortion procedure- right off the bat- just by pill instead of by surgery. Abortions are done either by surgery or by medication. Both types are against Texas law.

So this creates a question- if Ryan Hamilton’s wife was refused a surgical abortion because doctors were afraid of breaking the law, why was she readily given one by pills? Pills are the most common method of abortion in the US today, making up over 60% of abortions.

There is no logical explanation why doctors would be afraid to break the law by surgery but not by giving medication. If, in fact, they were afraid of breaking it in the first place.

Here’s the second reason why the story doesn’t add up. Here is a quote from the Texas law:

(b)  A physician does not violate this section if the physician performed a test for a fetal heartbeat as required by Section 171.203 and did not detect a fetal heartbeat.

Anyone with an internet connection can find this out in five minutes. Including CBS News. Including a doctor.

In fact, CBS News does admit: “The law does not require there to be a medical emergency to perform a D&C if there is no cardiac activity, like in the Hamiltons case.”

Then they accepted the whole story at face value with no real attempt to fact-check any of it, despite the logical inconsistency.

Hamilton says that when he and his wife returned to Sharepoint for another round of medication, a second doctor refused to give them the medication. This second doctor, it should be said, doesn’t appear in every version of the story (see below).

If there was a second doctor, and if he did refuse to prescribe the medication, would that be the fault of the law, or the fault of the doctor? It would be the fault of the doctor, because the law is crystal clear.

Instead of complaining about the law, Ryan Hamilton should be complaining about the doctor who couldn’t be bothered to look up what the law says.

The fact that the law is so clear makes the whole story seem shaky. The wording of the passage isn’t misleading or vague. I’m supposed to believe that a person who graduated medical school can’t understand what it says?

The law says one thing. The doctor (allegedly) did another. The one in error was the doctor.

The first inconsistency in the story is a contradiction in what medication was prescribed.

The CBS interviewer states, “Hamilton’s wife was prescribed misoprostol, a drug that induces labor and is used for both miscarriages and abortions.”

On Twitter, Hamilton says that the drug given was not misoprostal, but mifepristone.

Mifepristone and misoprostol are the two drugs given in the abortion pill regimen. Mifepristone is the first drug given. It blocks the hormone progesterone and causes the uterine lining to detach. Misoprostol is a prostaglandin. It is used to stimulate contractions. They are not the same drug. (Planned Parenthood gives details about these two different drugs here.)

Update: Incidentally, Live Action posted an article about this case, in which they said :

(Incidentally, a D&C is not the procedure done for an abortion. In a D&C, the cervix is dilated and the uterus is scraped. An abortion procedure is done by suction)

In the version of the story, quoted above, Ryan Hamilton says that his wife was given mifepristone, started to bleed heavily, and was rushed to the hospital. There is no mention of another doctor.

In yet another post on Twitter, the claim that a doctor refused misoprostol (mifepristone?) is back.

Either way, Ryan Hamilton’s wife was given abortion-causing drugs as soon as she sought medical care.

And they could have been the cause of her medical problems, or at least made them worse. One of the main side effects of the abortion pill regimen is heavy bleeding. According to what I’ll call version 2 (If CBS is version 1) of the story, she bled for three days after taking abortion-inducing drugs, then was rushed, hemorrhaging, to the hospital.

Similar things have happened to people who have taken the abortion drug for elective abortions.

18-year-old Manon Jones was perfectly healthy when she was given the abortion pill regimen. She hemorrhaged, required blood transfusions, and died from a combination of blood loss and infection.

Also, bleeding requiring medical care is so common with the abortion pill regimen that the perscriber’s agreement requires those prescribing it to have the:

ability to provide surgical intervention in cases of incomplete abortion or severe bleeding or have made plans to provide such care through others, and be able to assure patient access to medical facilities equipped to provide blood transfusions and resuscitation, if necessary.

So not only did Ryan Hamilton’s wife receive an abortion (if you can use the word abortion to describe being given the abortion pill to remove a baby who is already dead) the abortion may have been the cause of her subsequent problems.

What is emerging is a very different picture than “my helpless wife was refused an abortion when pregnant with our dead baby.”

But back to the claim that a second doctor refused to refill the medication. Did this happen? We don’t know. And the medical facility is not allowed to say.

And here we come to the next misleading part of the story.

CBS News states:

“SharePoint emergency center declined our request for comment, citing patient confidentiality and HIPAA laws.”

Note the wording here. CBS says “SharePoint “declined our request for comment” and “cite[d]” HIPPA laws. That makes it sound like the facility had a choice. CBS News is making it sound like they were asked to tell their side of the story and declined.

This is deeply misleading.

SharePoint cannot tell their side of the story. It is illegal for them to do so. HIPAA Laws forbid a medical facility from releasing any information about a patient.

If a person from SharePoint did comment on the case, they would face a $50,000 fine and one to ten years in jail. They aren’t even allowed to confirm that Ryan Hamilton was one of their patients.

So, essentially, we have a situation where Ryan Hamilton can make any claim he wants and no one from SharePoint can argue otherwise without risking jail time. Later in the video, CBS says this about the second, mysterious hospital:

In a statement, the hospital told CBS News. It follows Texas and federal laws in accordance with national standards of care.

This sounds vague and evasive. But in reality, it is the only thing the hospital is legally allowed to say. CBS doesn’t mention this, of course. In saying nothing about HIPAA here (and only briefly mentioning it before as something the hospital used as an excuse) CBS is being about as deceptive as a media outlet can be without actually lying.

And finally, to the last inconsistency, where the story changes yet again.

Ryan Hamilton withheld the name of the second medical facility that he says refused his wife a D&C, but he does give the name of the first. In the CBS interview, he says that SharePoint refused to do a D&C. In fact, the whole story revolves around this. The way he tells it, both medical centers refused to do a D&C because they didn’t want to do an abortion and risk breaking the law.

Well, another reporter decided to call SharePoint. And it turns out, they don’t do D&C’s there, or any other surgery. They didn’t refuse to do one. They don’t provide them. (Apparently, no one at CBS thought to check this.)

How did Ryan Hamilton respond? By changing his story again.

So now, according to him, they didn’t refuse it because they weren’t allowed to do it, they refused it and didn’t tell him why. This is completely different from what he claimed originally. He accused them of refusing to do a D&C out of fear of the law. That was the whole crux of his story – she was refused an abortion at two places because of the law.

Now he’s been caught, and he’s walking back his claims, in the hopes that we will forget what he originally said.

On Twitter, Hamilton has responded to all his critics the same way. By repeating, again and again, that he is getting attacked.

I spent about two hours on his Twitter feed this morning. reading comments. You know how many nasty messages by pro-lifers I saw? Zero. Zilch. Nada. I didn’t see one insult or personal attack. All I saw was people pointing out facts about the Texas law and about abortion-inducing drugs.

Has he actually gotten some hate mail? I don’t know, maybe. There are nasty people out there. I’ve gotten my share of hate mail from both sides of the political spectrum. I’ve gotten hate mail from Trump supporters and I’ve gotten hate mail from liberal pro-choicers. I know people send hate mail.

But I’m not seeing any evidence of a barrage of hateful messages he’s claiming to be getting. Ok, maybe he’s deleting them. But he must be deleting them fast, because like I said, I was on there for two hours and didn’t see a single one.

So here we have a story that gets slightly different every time it’s told.

We have a claim that abortion was refused when abortion was the first treatment offered.

Assuming one of the versions of the story is true, we have a doctor or doctors who clearly didn’t know the law, but the blame is being put on the law, and not the doctor(s) who didn’t know it.

None of this adds up to a coherent argument for why laws restricting abortion should be repealed.

I am adding this because Live Action News has some information I wasn’t privy to when I wrote this.

In their excellent write-up of the case (which you should read), they reveal the name of the second hospital— Lake Granbury Medical Center.

In their words:

Dallas News reported that the couple then drove to a hospital — Lake Granbury Medical Center — where they had given birth to their first child and where it was confirmed that their second baby had died. Doctors there told the couple that the situation wasn’t an emergency and offered to schedule a D&C at some point over the next two weeks. (A D&C to remove the remains of a deceased baby is 100% legal in Texas and every state.)

Instead, what did the doctors at this hospital do? Well, according to CBS News, “The doctors opted to give Hamilton’s wife a higher dose of misoprostol and sent her home for a third time.” (emphasis added)

Clearly, the hospital in this story knew the protocol for miscarriage management.

I’ll explain more about the recommended medical protocol for miscarriage in a minute.

First, though, I want to note that far from denying care, this hospital gave Ryan Hamilton’s wife yet another dose of abortion-causing drugs. They did not refuse care. Rather, they felt a D&C was medically unnecessary.

The Texas abortion law clearly has nothing to do with it with the fact that they gave abortion-causing drugs and not a surgical “abortion.”

It should be noted that D&Cs aren’t without medical risks.

According to the National Library of Medicine:

Infection, bleeding, cervical lacerations, uterine perforation, and postoperative uterine adhesions are complications of D&C in pregnant and nonpregnant patients.

According to this source, infection occurs in one out of 50 to one out of 100 patients. A small, but still significant risk.

It should be noted that uterine adhesions from a D&C can cause a condition called Asherman’s Syndrome, where scar tissue forms in the uterus. This can cause infertility as it can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting.

If a D&C isn’t needed, it shouldn’t be performed.

Despite what Ryan Hamilton (and possibly CBS) believe, an immediate D&C is not the standard of care for a miscarriage, although it may have been in the past.

According to a 2021 study:

In most cases, routine, ‘automatic’ surgical treatment of early miscarriage is no longer considered the standard of care. Both expectant management and medical (drug) treatment are safe alternatives to curettage.

Thank you to Live Action News for this reference.

And if I can (respectfully and thankfully) borrow from Live Action again, they note that Tim Miller, a correspondent for MSNBC, tweeted the following:

In Texas, “Pro-life” now means women being forced to exhume their dead, wanted baby out of their own body with a pill and the doctors only intervene if the massive blood they lose turns brown.

Yet when a pregnant person takes the abortion pill, they exhume their live, unwanted baby out of their own body with a pill and doctors only intervene if there’s a serious problem.

The procedure is the same. The drugs are the same. The only difference is, the baby is alive and unwanted. The process is identical.

(Incidentally, I have no idea where he’s getting the “blood turns brown” from. I’ve never heard about that being a medical problem. In fact, as a person who gets a period, my blood sometimes does turn brown toward the end of it. That’s perfectly normal. So I have no idea what he is talking about. He knows nothing about a woman’s menstrual cycle.)

Usually, in abortion pill cases, doctors only intervene if the person having the abortion goes to the emergency room with a raging infection or uncontrollable bleeding.

Both Ryan Hamilton’s wife took the same medication, the abortion-inducing drugs, that a person having an abortion takes. They go through the same exact process.

And yet, in Tim Miller’s mind, when Ryan Miller’s wife went through this process, it was “madness.” When a pregnant person who wants an abortion goes through this process, it’s good medical care.

One correspondent for MSNBC calls taking the abortion pills at home “madness” in the case of a miscarriage, when the woman was under the care of doctors.

Another MSNBC writer (who was published by the news outlet) wants even less supervision for women having abortions by pill.

She writes:

If you are someone who can get pregnant, I am begging you now: Obtain abortion pills. Get them because you may need them. Also get them because someone else you know might need them, too…

But I’m encouraging you — everyone who can get pregnant — to obtain abortion pills not just because you or I should have options as an individual. The second reason I want you to get them is because you might be the person to have them when someone else doesn’t. I think we should consider abortion pills part of a well-stocked home first aid kit. We can no longer trust that our formal health care system will be able to provide women with a safe way to end their pregnancies, so we need to be ready and able to help each other.

So the very same medicine that was “madness” for a woman having a miscarriage to take at home under a doctor’s supervision should, according to MSNBC, be stockpiled and handed out like candy to any pregnant person who wants it, with no medical supervision.

No medical exam. No aftercare. No doctor at all. And this is not just seen as a good thing, MSNBC is openly promoting it.

If that’s not the worst blatant hypocrisy imaginable, I don’t know what is.

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.