One woman miscarried in the restroom lobby of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.
“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care – this is inconceivable.”
It’s happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.
I don’t quite understand. How did banning abortions lead to doctors being scared of helping people give birth?
They are threatened to be held responsible and imprisoned for helping a woman abort
In my country medical professionals that help induce an abortion can be imprisoned for 4-10 years. Nonetheless, the thing described in the article doesn’t happen. It must be something else.
I’m assuming it because the legal liabilities are unknowns at this point and nobody wants to take the plunge to find out. The US “Justice” system is pretty fucked to say the least.
Yeah that makes sense.
And in your country I presume the law applies to the entire country, doesn’t vary by state, and wasn’t put into effect in very recent history.
After 10 or 20 years there will be enough legal precedent in each state that doctors and hospitals can formulate policies which will probably keep them safe from prosecution. Right now, they don’t have that capability, because everything is so new. And the only way to find out whether their actions are legal is to try them and see if they get charged and see what the courts say.
It’s important to keep in mind that the states with strict laws against abortion are run by Republicans who really don’t care about the doctors or the women. It’s not like the laws are perfectly crafted to guarantee that patients receive the best possible medical care.
In that case, do you expect these cases to go away with time? Ideally, abortion becomes legal again, but if it doesn’t will time make things at least a little better?
Well what i described is whats here on texas. Dipshit legislator capital of the u.s.
It has some serious competition.
If they accept the patient, and the patient needs an emergency abortion, then they could face legal consequences for providing one, or face losing their license for denying critical care.
Either way, if such a circumstance happens, the doctor is completely fucked, and they’d rather keep their job, and help other people.
There’s confusion about what is and isn’t allowed, which isn’t helping. Doctors don’t know what they could be sued for. Its in their best interest to not see patients like this. Doctors need protections at least, but governments have specifically taken steps to make them liable, and this confusion and refusal is part of the plan to make abortions this scary thing.
I live in a country where all abortions are banned. This sort of thing doesn’t happen here. Do you know why that could be? Time?
In the US, abortions are legal in some states and severely punished in other states. As a result, OB/GYN doctors have been physically moving en masse from the latter states to the former states.
This has left the latter states with an acute shortage of OB/GYNs. And if a hospital does not have an OB/GYN who can treat a patient, they will not admit an OB/GYN patient to the hospital.
But doesn’t the article say that there were doctors, but that they refused to perform their job?
The article says that ER doctors wouldn’t perform jobs that required OB/GYN training.
In some states you have to be in the process of “life at risk” before treatment now, or the doctor could be jailed. Lots of articles about this, women nearly dying, losing their reproductive organs, etc. It’s all very dehumanizing.
Because women that need abortions don’t go to regular doctors.
Well they don’t do that in Texas either, do they?
Because the state rules often aren’t clear on what Drs can/cannot do, so they’re scared of being arrested and charged.
It’s a major issue with laws when they intermingle with medical practice. Laws are kind of like bad computer code. It is written with an intention but that intention is only as good as how good your technical ability to write the code is which also hinges on understanding what all the potentially the factors at play are. Particularly when your law has particularly harsh penalties for misconduct.
Human bodies are complicated and a lot of law regarding operates in the space of “potential”. In a court of law in things like self defense cases where you have to defend your actions from persecution by the code have to prove you had no other “potential” avenues to take because if it can be proven you had other choices or there is a chance however small that you overreacted and things theoretically could have turned out fine the law swoops in and leaves you open to prosecution.
But medical stuff is complicated and nuanced in ways the law is not. Law is a rigid computer code. If you have a situation leaves an opening in the law for “cases that are life threatening.” and someone does the thing they then leave themselves open to the potential of having to prove that every single other option was exhausted. If someone is stable and not in immediate distress… Even though you know they will be later given predictable odds it becomes a nightmare of leaving more doubt so one tactic is to just wait until things are life threatening… But the problem with life threatening cases is they hold extra damages and risks. If your life is in danger your organs are failing. There is no question the house is burning down when the flames burst through the windows but if you wanted to mitigate the damages putting it out when the candle first tipped over has the best long term results …
Say a law stipulates that it’s only permissible to help in the event the house is “burning down”. This means you have to agree in a court room that your definition of “burning down” is in fact a reasonable interpretation of that specific language. One tactic to be safe is you wait until nobody can argue the state of the house. Would you say a little spot of your carpet being on fire is the house “burning down”? It’s not good sure but isn’t that hyperbole? What constitutes “burning down” anyway? So your carpet burning isn’t the house burning down and there’s no provision for the the drapes and furniture, or an oil or oven fire… Those are all not causing damage directly to the structure of the house so the house isn’t even burning much less “down”… But if you wait the house will catch fire… But is it “burning down”? It’s when the structure of your house is in danger of collapsing right? Down still implies a fire where the house is pretty advanced and there isn’t much left afterwards right? At what point is the house actually “burning down”? When the structure catches probably isn’t burning “down” is it when 25% of the structure ia compromised? If you put out the fire then the house wouldn’t be “down” would it? Still a lot of house that is in fact “up”. Well 50% is probably a good call right? Oh but then it’s only " in imminent danger of burning down" not actively “burning down” …
Laws like anti abortion laws tend to be created to be big and showy and easy for lay people to read because they are essentially political showboating. Every place with a total abortion ban has shown to be terrible for women’s healthcare in exactly this way and none of this outcome was a surprise to the people fighting to keep abortion legal.
Thanks! Your reply is what finally made me fully “get it”.
The states mention in the article say that you can only abort if the mother’s health is in danger, or in the cases of rape and incest. If you’re treating a pregnant woman and she’s in critical condition, you might be faced with having to do an abortion. If you do it, the courts might say the woman wasn’t in enough danger. If you don’t, the courts might say you caused the patient’s death.
Where I live, abortion is 100% banned (hooray for Catholicism). In some other comments in this chain, I asked why that might now happen here.
This is why. To hell if your house is burning, you are not allowed to put it out. Therefore this choice doesn’t happen and the gynecologists just do their job, or at least try to.
because if they fuck up at all, which happens, or something unforseen happens (which, yeah), they’re liable. legally.
Damn. That is utterly insane.
no its perfectly sane in the context of capitalism.
which is sane. legally, according to the dsm and icd.