Episode 182 — A Doctor Speaks Out: Abortion, Medical Ethics & Idaho’s Prop 1 w/ Dr. Katherine Aberle

What does it mean to practice medicine when the smallest patients cannot speak for themselves?

On Episode 182 of The Backlash, Dr. Katherine Aberle joins Dave Reilly to discuss abortion, medical ethics, and her opposition to Idaho’s Proposition 1.

Dr. Aberle signed an open letter from Idaho physicians opposing the initiative and has been speaking at churches across the state, making the case for protecting pre-born children and supporting their mothers.

We examine how medicine’s understanding of its youngest patients has changed—from mistaken assumptions about newborns’ capacity to feel pain to the use of anesthesia and analgesia during surgery before and after birth. What should those changes teach us about medical certainty, humility, and our obligations to vulnerable patients?

We also discuss the original Hippocratic Oath’s explicit prohibition on providing an abortion-inducing pessary, its omission from a widely used modern version written in 1964, and what changing medical oaths reveal about the profession’s ethical commitments.

A conversation about conscience, the duty to protect life, and why Dr. Aberle is speaking out against abortion and Proposition 1.