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‘How much bleeding is too much?’ Doctors put in impossible situations in forced birth states [1]
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Date: 2022-09-12
Hospitals and individual doctors in them are convening task forces of attorneys and physicians to try to add some clarity to legal language that, in many cases, is anything but relevant to actual medicine. Like in Wisconsin, where a 173-year-old law banning abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court ended federal protections for abortion, has put the issue in limbo. The courts have been asked to rule on whether it can be enforced, but prosecutors have said they intend to follow. That means providers have stopped performing abortions under threat of prosecution. Abortion is technically allowed in “cases of life endangerment, severely compromised physical health,” or rape and incest, but a law from 1849 doesn’t provide much medical insight as to what cases that might encompass.
In Arizona, one hospital just decided they had to have a lawyer on call at all times to determine if the dire health condition of their patients would require an abortion. That hospital has also added electronic medical forms where doctors can document that without their intervention, their patients would have died without an abortion. Other hospitals have instituted policies that require multiple doctors to agree on abortion as a necessary treatment. In fact, in Indiana and Louisiana, the law requires two doctors to certify the need for an abortion.
All that makes the chance that a pregnant person faces serious health conditions, some lifelong, or dies because of the delay in treatment. In the case of at least one woman in Texas, not having timely access to abortion meant she had to have a hysterectomy, preventing her from ever bearing a child again, if she so wished.
Every week brings a new horror story, from clinics in states where it is still legal being so overwhelmed, that providing timely care is difficult or impossible. It’s women being unjustly imprisoned for being pregnant, to having to carry a dead fetus for weeks until they care close enough to dying for a doctor to feel it was legally allowed to save her life.
This is taking a tremendous toll on everyone involved, including the healthcare providers who just want to help their patients reach the best possible decisions for their own health and lives. “Now that patient autonomy has gone away,” said Dr. Abigail Cutler, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I’m compelled by my conscience to provide abortion care, and I have the training and the skills to do so compassionately and well,” she said. “And so to have my hands tied and not be able to help a person in front of me is devastating.”
Physician groups and public health associations are speaking out in lawsuits in Texas and in Idaho to argue about what the bans mean for their work, and for saving lives. In Idaho, where the Justice Department has sued to protect physicians, they argue the state’s ban “willfully disregards what it means to pregnant patients—and their doctors—to be told that, alone among all patients seeking emergency care and contrary to medical guidelines and ethics, they must wait until their life is in jeopardy to receive treatment.”
A federal judge has blocked the Idaho law which would ban abortion in medical emergencies, stopping it for now. Lawmakers there have appealed.
These stories are not going to go away because complications from pregnancy—or illnesses that pregnancy makes life-threatening—will continue to happen, and people will continue to die preventable, awful deaths. We need to keep hearing these stories. The people living them need to keep telling them.
It’s a reality that must be faced in order to correct it.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/12/2122477/--How-much-bleeding-is-too-much-Doctors-put-in-impossible-situations-in-forced-birth-states
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