DICKINSON Dr. Thomas Arnold is a practicing gynecologist and obstetrician at CHI St. Alexius Health in Dickinson who also volunteers at Connect Medical Clinic. Arnold earned his degree from the Uiversity of North Dakota, School of Medicine, in 1984 and has been a practicing OBGYN for decades.

Arnold explained how an ectopic pregnancy occurs, noting that it is defined as those rare instances when a fertilized egg grows outside the uterus usually in the fallopian tubes. He said that both legally and medically, this is completely different from an abortion.

Ectopic pregnancies most commonly occur in the fallopian tubes, and they can be life threatening to the mother because of rupture and bleeding that can occur. They're not pregnancies that can be sustained in the woman's body. The fallopian tubes cannot accommodate a pregnancy like that, Arnold said. If you have a patient that has an ectopic pregnancy, that can be managed within the environment of the Catholic Health System.

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He explained the distinction between an elective abortion and the termination of a non-viable pregnancy and how the two are widely recognized throughout the medical community.

Colleagues of mine, physicians and medical personnel in general, consider an abortion to be the termination of a live pregnancy. I just read an article about someone who had a fetal demise about seven months into the pregnancy and she was told that if if they intervene that it was an abortion. Well, I don't think most medical professionals will look at management of a fetal demise, where you have a baby that's non-viable, as an abortion, he said.

Among those who have spread misinformation on this topic, one of the most seemingly credible sources was Daily Beast Columnist Wajahat Ali. He incorrectly conflated abortion with ectopic pregnancies and further spread a commonly misunderstood legal liability concern to his nearly 300,000 followers on social media both assertions being incorrect.

Do I abort this ectopic pregnancy to literally save my life or do I go to jail? Question women in America now have to ask, Ali stated in a viral tweet. Also, doctors who have taken an Oath to save lives now have to risk jail as well. It's a mess.

Reuters reports that only abortionists, those who perform clandestine abortions, or pharmacists who illegally distribute abortion inducing pills to end life in the womb can suffer prosecution under these state laws. Thirteen states, including North Dakota, have trigger laws that subsequently banned abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The states trigger law took effect on June 28, as the 2007 statute behind it included a 30-day waiting period after Roe being struck down.

Five other states had statutory abortion bans prior to 1973 that now go back into effect.

Of all 18 states, each has an exception to allow procedures to terminate pregnancies in the event the mothers life is in danger. No state penalizes women who seek abortions, and anti-abortion activist groups overwhelmingly oppose prosecuting said women.

Prominent New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also made misleading claims about reproductive health care in a viral Instagram video to her millions of followers.

A bunch of men who are very ignorant about medicine, biology, rape culture and the misogyny that they were raised in, including legal liability and how it factors in with the medical field people who are ignorant to all of that are the ones that are writing these laws, Ocasio-Cortez argued in an Instagram video. "Some of them were even written in the 1800s So dont tell me that people in the 1800s knew what an ectopic pregnancy was."

Despite the seemingly primitive medical technology of the era, not only were medical professionals impressively able to identify ectopic pregnancies, but by the final decades of that century they were even treating them.

In 1883 British surgeon Robert Lawson Tait performed the first successful procedure terminating an ectopic pregnancy, a condition which then had a 60% mortality rate. Tait lost only two of the 42 women he performed this surgery on.

Miscarriages have also been a hot topic of misinformation in light of some states moving to bans on abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. In a June 24 Facebook post , Lillian Jones, a Democratic NPL nominated candidate for state house in District 41, shared her opposition to the Dobbs v. Jackson decision.

I lost an unexpected child to miscarriage and endured a procedure that saved my life. A womans Constitutional right to choose just got struck down, along with a familys right to make decisions regarding health and household composition, Jones said in the post, implying that such procedures may no longer be available to women who need them.

CHI St. Alexius, an ardently "pro-life institution of the Catholic church," has been providing surgery and medication to treat miscarriages nearly since its inception, and Arnold said they will continue to do so. As previously explained by Arnold, no abortion ban in any state hinders doctors from treating miscarriages.

Arnold categorized a miscarriage as a medical condition that is more common than most people realize, and most often occurs before the woman realizes shes pregnant.

Miscarriages are most often due to a genetic abnormality, where the pregnancy progresses inside the uterus to a certain gestational stage. Then for reasons we don't always find out, the pregnancy becomes non-viable, he said. The body perceives this at some point. It will usually respond by trying to eliminate the pregnancy by contracting, bleeding and passing over the tissue naturally. That's not a perfect system however, and in some cases, the bleeding and cramping can be severe enough where women will come into the clinic or the emergency room for a surgical evacuation of the uterus.

He reiterated that his and most definitions of abortion only include viable pregnancies.

Most people will say the difference between a miscarriage and a termination or an abortion would be that one is a non-viable pregnancy and the other is a viable pregnancy, Arnold said.

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