The Abortion Bans Are Putting Women's Lives In Danger

 

Pro-choice voices tried to warn Americans what would happen if Roe vs. Wade was overturned, but the Supreme Court (and the radical right) did not care. Now the country's women are starting to reap what those radicals have sown -- pain, suffering, and death!

The following excellent op-ed is by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post:

Just as advocates of abortion access warned, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is resulting in increased pain, anguish and risk of death for pregnant women. It’s forcing health-care providers into a Catch-22 where they increasingly must navigate between their professional obligation to provide appropriate medical care and their fear of criminal prosecution and loss of their medical licenses.

The Post reports that “the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.”

Forced-birth zealots have set up a system in which doctors in states with draconian and/or hopelessly vague abortion bans are compelled to defer medically recommended abortion until the woman is at imminent risk of death. In those states, too, pharmacists resist filling a prescription for medication to resolve miscarriages — because exactly the same drug is used for abortion.

The new legal thicket can delay access to medical abortions (generally available up to 10 or 11 weeks) and thereby require women to undergo more expensive and risky surgery. Confusion about the legal status of treating ectopic pregnancies — virtually none of which would result in a live birth — can put women’s health in grave danger. (The Post reports: “Delaying treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is so dangerous it would amount to malpractice, said Pamela Parker, an OB/GYN in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.”)

Lauren Thaxton, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells me that because medical risks associated with pregnancy (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, cardiac conditions) might develop later in pregnancy, possibly manifesting suddenly, these new, stringent requirements prevent doctors and patients from responsible planning that would weigh the risk of death and risk to the woman’s long-term health.

Doctors may be at the mercy of hospital lawyers, who themselves may not be able to predict how imprecise state laws, written in nonmedical terms, might be applied. While doctors are used to assessing what they might reasonably expect, state laws might demand a level of certainty to perform an abortion that simply does not apply in medical settings.

If, for example, a woman suffers a ruptured membrane (water breaking) before 22 to 24 weeks, the chance of the fetus’s survival is negligible while the woman faces risk of infection or hemorrhaging, Thaxton explains. A responsible OB/GYN almost certainly would not delay or deny an abortion; under Texas’s rigid six-week abortion ban, that might be precisely what the doctor is compelled to do.

The impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on girls should make all but the most heartless forced-birth advocates shudder. “New bans in nearly a dozen states do not make exceptions for rape or incest, leaving young adolescents — already among the most restricted in their abortion options — with less access to the procedure,” the New York Times reports. “Even in states with exemptions for rape and incest, requirements involving police reports and parental consent can be prohibitive for children and teenagers.”

The disastrous episode involving a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio could be repeated countless times as abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest multiply.

Even before Dobbs’s full impact is known, Americans are already expressing deep opposition to a new legal landscape that puts consideration of women’s well-being, even their lives, at the bottom of the list. In the latest Fox News poll, 60 percent oppose the court’s overturning of Roe, and the new regimen in many states is hugely unpopular. Only 9 percent would ban abortion if the woman’s life is at risk and only 11 percent if her health is endangered or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

Pro-women’s-life-and-health advocates have an opportunity to focus voters’ attention on state ballot measures regarding abortion rights (in Kansas next month, in Michigan in November), and on the abortion stances of candidates in state and local elections.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort to take up a bill that would guarantee women’s right to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Now we are beginning to see just how tyrannical and radical is the mind-set of forced-birth crusaders.

Congress would be well advised to hold hearings not only in Washington but also in states where bans are going into effect to educate state lawmakers, governors and voters about the the post-Roe world the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have imposed on Americans.

It behooves the media, the medical profession and anyone defending the dignity, health and life of women to demand that Republicans face up to the consequences of their handiwork — and to demand accountability for the damage they are causing.