With a great platform comes great responsibility to tell the truth, but many celebrities sadly use their spotlight to cozy up to the abortion industry and further mislead the public. We saw a recent example of this with actress and former fashion model Torrey DeVitto, who has recently published an op-ed claiming she had two abortions. The problem with this narrative, however? She didn’t — and her conflation of abortion as it is culturally understood and miscarriage only hurts women. Here’s what you need to know: 

DeVitto, who previously played in popular television dramas including ‘One Tree Hill,’ ‘Pretty Little Liars,’ and ‘The Vampire Diaries,’ recently wrote a USA Today article entitled “I Had Two Very Different Abortions. There’s No One-Size Policy for Reproductive Health.” The mistaken point of her article was that sometimes abortions are for convenience, and sometimes they are medically necessary. Her thesis is fatally flawed, however — especially when you look at her own story and see that she didn’t actually have two abortions. 

She had one. 

In her op-ed, DeVitto explains that she became pregnant at 21 years old and decided to have an abortion because she had just started her acting career. She made the choice to end her child’s future “for her own future,” and this certainly is the commonly understood definition of abortion: the intentional killing of a preborn child for convenience. Some may also refer to this as “direct abortion” or “elective abortion,” but when discussing the hot-button issue within our society today, this is exactly the scenario that is being referred to with the word “abortion.”

DeVitto’s second pregnancy outcome, however, is much different, despite her claim that it was another abortion. Let’s decode her explanation of this together. 

She wrote, “A few years after my abortion, as I was further along in my career and ready for a child, I became pregnant and miscarried. In order to aid the process, I needed to take an abortion pill to self-manage the miscarriage – once again, making the right choice for myself and my body. In these moments, I feared the abortion stigma from family, friends and – being in the entertainment industry – the public.” 

The key word here is “miscarried” — because when women have a miscarriage and receive miscarriage care, it’s totally different from an abortion.

Why? Because the intentions and actions behind a miscarriage and an abortion are opposites. With a miscarriage, the preborn child’s death is due to natural causes, and their life is mourned. Although a woman may sometimes need assistance through surgery or drugs to expel their dead child’s body, this cannot be an abortion because the baby has already passed away at this point. 

An abortion, on the other hand, purposefully kills the preborn and is only considered “successful” when a child dies. The surgeries and drugs used for abortions are intended to both kill the child and remove their body from within their mother. 

And yes, the healthcare industry does use the term “spontaneous abortion” to talk about miscarriages — but unless you have a medical credential next to your name, that is not the common usage of the word. To pretend otherwise is deliberately muddying the waters and directly corrosive to the mental health of women who have experienced miscarriage. 

(Click HERE to read another SFLA blog on this topic entitled “Pro-Abortion Media Hurts Grieving Mothers with Miscarriage Lies.”)

But if you’re interested in an opinion on this from someone with medical credentials, Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), said, “In a move meant to manipulate the public, abortion proponents have attempted to equivocate miscarriage and abortion. This is not only false but it also exploits the heartache that so many women and families have experienced through the loss of a child.”

While we mourn the loss of DeVitto’s children — one through abortion and one through miscarriage — it’s important not to twist the truth for political gain. Miscarriage care isn’t abortion, and it’s not going away. As the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) confirmed recently, every state has protections for such care, and the pro-life movement wants to keep it that way. 

The only thing we want to say bye bye to? Killing innocent preborn babies on purpose: abortion. 

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