[This is Part 2 of “Wholly Pro-Life”, a 6-part series on what a consistent pro-life ethic requires across the full span of human life and condition.]
Twelve Hours Into Labor
Cherise Doyley had been in labor for twelve hours when a nursing supervisor wheeled a tablet up to her hospital bed. On the screen: a judge in a black robe, several lawyers, and nearly a dozen doctors and hospital staff, most of them white. Doyley, a professional birthing doula who had delivered three children by C-section before, wanted to try for a vaginal birth this time. The hospital disagreed, and rather than simply proceeding over her objection or accepting her refusal, it asked a court to decide.[1]
Doyley had no lawyer. Florida courts do not require one for pregnant women contesting their own medical care, and the hospital did not provide an advocate. She argued her own case, from a hospital bed, hooked to monitors, for three hours.
That scene is the starting point for this article–not because a hearing is inherently wrong, but because of who got a seat at the table it built, and who did not.
What This Article Is Not Arguing
Before going further, it is worth being precise about what this article is not claiming. Later that night, Doyley’s baby’s heart rate dropped for seven minutes. Doctors moved quickly, and Doyley was taken into surgery; her daughter was initially limp but became responsive within minutes, though she was brought to the NICU for respiratory distress. A similar pattern held for Brianna Bennett, a Florida woman who faced a nearly identical hearing eighteen months earlier: during her own proceeding, her baby’s heart rate spiked, and the C-section followed immediately.[2]
Those interventions are not the target of this article. When a baby’s heart rate genuinely drops, doctors have an obligation to act, and acting quickly is not a failure of dignity toward anyone. That is simply what practicing medicine in fragile, fallen bodies requires. A fallen world produces moments like these regularly, moments with no space for extended deliberation, and Christian ethics does not get to pretend those moments do not exist. Nothing here argues that doctors should have hesitated once a real emergency existed, or that Doyley or Bennett were wrong to eventually consent once one did.
What this article is examining is different: the hours that came before either emergency, when there was time to build a fair process and that choice was not made. That distinction matters, because collapsing it either direction gets the article wrong: read as an argument against emergency intervention, it says something it does not mean to say, and read as approval of everything that happened before the emergency, it misses the point entirely.
What Actually Happened
Doyley had three prior C-sections, one of which caused a hemorrhage severe enough to keep her hospitalized for nearly a week. She understood the risk of uterine rupture from attempting a vaginal birth to be under two percent, a figure within the range doctors themselves cite, and told doctors repeatedly that she wanted to try, reserving surgery for a genuine emergency. During the hearing, the hospital’s doctors testified that Doyley’s history of stalled labors raised their concern, and that the hospital had been recognized for its low C-section rate and did not perform unnecessary surgeries. Neither the doctors nor Doyley, arguing her own case, raised her own profession’s ethical guidelines, though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has deemed court-ordered C-sections “ethically impermissible.” The judge ultimately agreed with the framework Doyley herself proposed. He ruled she could keep laboring, and the hospital could operate only if defined emergency conditions were met.[3]
Bennett’s case ran a similar course a year and a half earlier at a different Florida hospital. She had also had three difficult prior C-sections, each recovery worse than the last, and worried she could not care for her children, one of whom needed her help caring for a grandmother who used a wheelchair, while recovering from a fourth surgery. As her labor stretched past twenty-four hours, the hospital brought fifteen to twenty people into her hospital room for a virtual hearing. Her own stated objection during that hearing was not about fetal risk. She asked who in the room would help her bathe, change her pad, or lift her newborn once she had been cut open and left to recover. The surgery that followed lasted two and a half hours, required cutting around existing scar tissue, and left her needing a wound vac to help the incision heal. A doctor who visited her room afterward told her she should never get pregnant again; Bennett later filed a civil rights complaint over her treatment, still unresolved more than a year later.[4]
Doyley, too, named something the hearing had no space for. She was the only Black person on the screen, facing roughly twenty people, most of them white, and said so directly: she believed race shaped why she was in that room at all.[5] (That thread deserves its own treatment, which the installment in this series on racism will take up directly. It is not developed further here.)
One Party’s Interest Got a Courtroom
What both hearings had in common was not medical dishonesty. It was structural imbalance. A judge convened, lawyers argued, and defined thresholds were written down and applied. The unborn child’s interest received the full machinery of a legal proceeding: representation, argument, a ruling.
The mother’s interest received none of that same architecture. Doyley had no lawyer of her own. Bennett’s stated concern, about who would help her recover once surgery was over, never became a question the hearing was built to answer. When Doyley told the judge she believed race was part of why she was in that room, he responded that he did not find race had much to do with it, and the hearing moved on. Whatever the truth of that exchange, it illustrates the pattern plainly: one set of concerns had formal legal standing in the room, and another set, however seriously felt by the person raising it, did not. Both women were present, both were heard in some limited sense, but only one party’s stake in the outcome had been given a courtroom.
A bioethics expert who studies these cases put the underlying issue simply: there are no other circumstances in American law where the state invades the body of one person to protect the life of another. Whatever one believes about fetal personhood, that principle usually holds even when a person’s refusal of treatment will cost someone else their life. Pregnancy is treated as the exception, and treated that way consistently enough that legal scholars who track these cases say Florida shows a higher rate of forced C-sections than other states.[6]
Scripture treats a person’s own body as something entrusted to them, not something to be managed on their behalf by others regardless of how well-intentioned those others are. Paul tells the Corinthian church that their bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit, bought at a price (1 Cor. 6:19-20). That grounds a claim about who has standing to be reckoned with when decisions are made about a body: the person inside it. A legal process built to protect one image-bearer’s interest, while leaving the other image-bearer’s own voice structurally unrepresented, has not weighed two competing goods fairly. It has decided in advance whose interest would count as a legal matter and whose would not.
The Other Direction
IVF runs the same imbalance in reverse. Where the court hearings gave the unborn child formal institutional weight and left the mother’s voice unrepresented, reproductive technology typically gives the intending parents’ desires full institutional and practical weight while giving the embryo none at all.
Fertility clinics routinely create more embryos than will be implanted in a given cycle, since retrieval and fertilization are physically demanding and expensive enough that most families want several viable embryos from a single round. Some of those embryos are selected for transfer based on genetic screening. Others are frozen indefinitely, sometimes for years, while a family decides what to do with them. Some are eventually discarded, quietly and without any process resembling the one Doyley and Bennett went through. No one convenes a hearing, argues on the embryo’s behalf, or applies a defined threshold to determine whether discarding it was justified. The intending parents and the clinic serving them have every institutional and financial mechanism working in their favor, while the party with the most at stake, since these embryos are in fact human beings bearing God’s image, has no advocate of any kind.
This is not an argument that every embryo must be implanted or that fertility treatment is inherently wrong; rather, it is an observation about where the weight falls. A society capable of convening a three-hour hearing over one woman’s medical decision has built no comparable process for the earliest and most vulnerable human lives it also claims, in other contexts, to be protecting.
Scripture describes the embryo not as undifferentiated biological material but as a person already known. The psalmist writes that God knit him together in his mother’s womb, and that his frame was not hidden from God even before he was formed, when he was being made in secret (Ps. 139:13-16). If that is true of every embryo, not only the ones a family intends to carry to term, an embryo’s standing does not depend on whether anyone built a legal process to recognize it. It depends on whose image it bears, and that image does not wait for a family’s decision or a clinic’s protocol to become real.
Institutional Protection Is Not the Same as Regard
Both cases, set side by side, show the same pattern: A courtroom convened for the unborn child while the mother argued her own case unrepresented, and a fertility process gives full weight to parental desire while the embryo has no advocate at all. Different direction, same root: institutional protection distributed unevenly, by design rather than by accident.
None of the parties involved needed to act in bad faith for this imbalance to hold: the doctors believed they were protecting Doyley’s child, the judge believed he was applying the law fairly, and fertility clinics believe they are helping families have children they desperately want. None of that is in question. What is in question is whether good intentions inside an uneven structure still produce an uneven outcome, and they do, every time, because a structure that only formally represents one party’s interest will keep deciding in that party’s favor even when everyone involved means well.
A gospel-shaped view of human dignity refuses to let institutional protection fall unevenly across image-bearers, whether that means a legal system that gives a judge, a hearing, and defined criteria to protect an unborn child while leaving the mother without her own counsel or voice, or a fertility industry that gives full weight to what parents want while giving embryos no standing at all. Building a process is not the same as recognizing everyone that process affects. A society can hold three-hour hearings, write careful legal thresholds, and still fail the image of God in the room, simply by deciding in advance which party’s interest was worth building a process for.
The Image That Does Not Wait for a Courtroom
Genesis does not rank the mother’s dignity below the child’s or the embryo’s dignity below the outcome the adults involved are hoping for. Both are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27), and that image does not require a hearing, a lawyer, or a legal threshold to be real. It is real before anyone builds a process to recognize it, and it remains real when no one does.
That is the claim underneath both of these cases: whether every image-bearer affected by a decision had a genuine voice in reaching it, not whether the medical calls were right or whether the fertility clinic’s outcome was the one the family wanted. A gospel-shaped pro-life ethic has to ask that question in both directions, toward the mother whose voice a courtroom left out, and toward the embryo for whom no courtroom was ever built at all. Getting comfortable with either omission, because the outcome felt urgent or because no one demanded otherwise, is not consistency–it is the same selective concern this series began by naming.
Questions for Reflection
- Where in your own life have you assumed a fair process was in place simply because a formal one existed?
- Whose voice is easiest for you to leave out of a decision that affects them, even when you mean well?
- How does it change your view of these cases to know the medical concern in both was genuine?
- What would it look like, practically, to give a voiceless party real standing rather than good intentions alone?
- Where do you see the same imbalance, protection for one party and none for another, in situations closer to home?
Prayer Points
- Ask God to show you where you have mistaken a process for actual regard toward the people it affects.
- Pray for mothers facing high-stakes medical decisions, that they would have real advocates and not just good intentions directed at them.
- Ask the Lord to give the church wisdom in caring for families navigating fertility treatment, including the moral weight of the embryos involved.
- Pray for The Gospel Lens as this series continues, that readers would hold both convictions in this article without collapsing either one.
[1]Amy Yurkanin, “They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.,” ProPublica, March 14, 2026, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections. Accessed August 26, 2026.
[2]Amy Yurkanin, “They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.,” ProPublica, March 14, 2026, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections. Accessed August 26, 2026.
[3]Amy Yurkanin, “They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.,” ProPublica, March 14, 2026, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections. Accessed August 26, 2026.
[4]Amy Yurkanin, “They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.,” ProPublica, March 14, 2026, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections. Accessed August 26, 2026.
[5]Amy Yurkanin, “They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.,” ProPublica, March 14, 2026, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections. Accessed August 26, 2026.
[6]Amy Yurkanin, “They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.,” ProPublica, March 14, 2026, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections. Accessed August 26, 2026.
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