Obstetricians leaving red states such as Idaho
I recently posted another article about a prominent doctor in Louisiana who felt compelled to pull up stakes and move his family to NY.
At what point will there be a critical mass of critically endangered women because they can’t find doctors to treat them?
For some Republicans, that’s a feature, not a bug.
And critically endangered fetuses, too. Not that Republicans have ever actually cared about them, either.
Nor about them after they manage to get born. The Rs certainly do not care about education. Well, they care about it enough to destroy it in their states.
I wasn’t sure which thread to put this, but this one is about the evil consequences of anti-abortion legislation, so here goes.
Anti-Abortion Lawyer Wants Names of People Who Donated to 9 Texas Abortion Funds
A Texas lawyer is trying to get the names of donors to nine abortion funds in the state, as well as information on every abortion the funds may have assisted with since September 2021, when the state’s bounty-hunter law took effect. He’s seeking the identities of thousands of people in Texas and across the country in a move that advocates say could threaten the operations of the non-profit groups, which are already struggling to raise enough money.
The effort isn’t likely to be successful because the First Amendment protects people’s right to associate, but the lawyer doesn’t need a judge to agree with him in order to cause harm for abortion seekers. Just the act of requesting the information could be enough to scare people out of donating to abortion funds, said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director for If/When/How, an advocacy organization that helps abortion seekers with legal questions and runs a defense fund for criminal abortion cases.
Yeah. Like that “information” won’t include a patient’s name and address either.
The justices found that the court should not have gotten involved in the case so quickly, and majority reinstated a lower court order that had allowed hospitals in the state to perform emergency abortions to protect a pregnant patient’s health.
The opinion means the Idaho case will continue to play out in lower courts, and could end up before the Supreme Court again. It doesn’t answer key questions about whether doctors can provide emergency abortions elsewhere, a pressing issue as most Republican-controlled states have moved to restrict the procedure in the two years since the high court overturned Roe v. Wade.
This happened two years ago, but the news has just come out. A woman in Georgia died while getting a too-long-delayed emergency abortion.
https://www.jezebel.com/28-year-old-single-mother-died-because-of-georgias-abortion-ban
Atlantic article from a few days ago focusing on Idaho:
Just heartbreaking.
In July 2022, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) said he was “overjoyed” his ban would take effect and claimed the state would keep women “safe, healthy, and informed.” A spokesperson for the governor’s office told ProPublica last week that their reporting on Thurman’s death amounted to a “fear-mongering campaign.” This is similar to a comment from attorneys for Georgia back in 2022, calling medical expert’s warnings about the dangers of abortion bans “hyperbolic fear mongering.”
Two weeks after that comment, Thurman would be dead, her then-six-year-old son left without a mother.
Just to make the link more obvious, here’s the ProPublica report:
More precisely, an abortion-denial-related death.
Sadly, BOTH sides can argue “wins” on this one.
The anti-abortion cohort can rather smugly say that if she hadn’t tried to kill her baby, she wouldn’t have BEEN in that position anyway.
Morons.
Can the hospital be sued for malpractice for refusing to perform a banned procedure? That could set up a double bind; the doctors must either break the law by performing a D&C, or get sued for huge bucks for not performing a D&C.
The problem is that, as anti-choice folks will tell you, the procedure isn’t banned. It’s just basically on double secret probation, with no one able or willing to define when it can be performed. The reason for that being that nearly every case has unique parameters where the medical staff have to stop and think “could I go to jail for doing this?”.
The doctors have malpractice insurance, and there’s also a chance that the hospital will also indemnify them, so given the choice between personally going to jail, or having their insurance pay out, it’s not a difficult choice.
I guess you didn’t read the article. The baby was already dead. She had a miscarriage. She needed a D&C to remove some remaining fetal remains that became septic. So, no, she did not try to kill her baby. She wanted it.
I get the distinct impression that these laws are written vaguely on purpose just so providers have to stop to ponder the possible repercussions (and in the case of hospitals/clinics, get the legal department involved as well). In the meantime the woman’s condition deteriorates.
In the minds* of these trogolodytes**, anything that throws a roadblock into a woman getting reproductive care they don’t approve of is a win. If it causes her suffering, so much the better.
* I know, facts asserted without evidence.
** Apologies to any actual troglodytes who may be reading this.
She had complications from a medication abortion (abortion pills). She certainly didn’t want it.
That is, of course, no argument that she should therefore not have received a timely D&C. Her death was completely preventable and an indictment of the anti-choice crowd.
But that fact has indeed been used as an argument in favor of abortion bans (“it’s her fault she took those pills”). It’s a stupid argument, and an evil argument. But it’s been made.
I reread it, and the person mentioned had taken medication to cause an abortion: “…she accepted the clinic’s offer of abortion pills…Several days after initiating the medication abortion, Thurman vomited blood and fainted in her home… a series of tests revealed remaining tissue in her uterus and that she had developed sepsis…”.
So the anti-abortion crew may well be quietly (or not so quietly) saying "pity, but she deserved it for killing her baby. ". (note: those assholes can rot in hell).
To me, the doctors in question committed malpractice. As described, it would have been quite clear that there was no longer a viable pregnancy. Which SHOULD have meant that a D&C was not only medically indicated, but quite legal, DESPITE the insane laws in her home state.