What Pregnant Texas Women Can Do To protect Themselves

The following is part of an article in CourierTexas.com:

“It’s like a knife straight to your stomach,” Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston-based OB-GYN at an academic hospital, told Courier Texas about a third woman dying in the state during a miscarriage.

“It’s just like, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to do something to stop this. Pregnancy is high-risk enough without putting all these complications on top of it.”

The “complications” that Ivey is warning Texas women about are the state’s two abortion bans, which outlaw abortions in Texas from the moment of conception.

The laws impose such harsh penalties on doctors that they are “terrified that they’re going to be criminalized,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas-based OB-GYN.

And why wouldn’t they be terrified when they face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion that’s considered illegal? They’ll also be stripped of their medical licence, have to pay a $100,000 fine, and can also be sued civilly by anyone who wants to claim a bounty of $10,000 if they can prove a doctor provided an abortion. . . .

Young women who are having complications miscarrying can appear healthy before getting “sick very quickly,” Ivey explained.

How women can protect themselves

“If you are experiencing serious symptoms while miscarrying, you have to move very quickly to prevent (your) organs from failing,” Ivey said. 

And while only three Texas women have been documented to have died from miscarriages since the state’s abortion ban has been in place, the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy or labor complications soared 56% from 2019 to 2022, according to a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

Kaplan said he advises pregnant mothers in Texas to pack a “to go bag” so that “if you need to get out of this state to get the care you need, you’ll be ready to go. Always be thinking — if something were to go wrong, where am I headed outside of Texas.”

But what can a pregnant woman who can’t quickly leave Texas do if local hospitals or urgent care centers don’t appear to be taking the risk to their lives seriously?

“Go to the biggest city near you and go to the downtown-ist hospital and don’t care what it looks like,” Binford said. ”They have the most volumes of deliveries and with volume come pregnancy complications and that means experience in handling them.”

Binford also advised that hospitals affiliated with medical schools will have established ethics committees that will include a lawyer and that committee members will be reachable quickly if a doctor is unsure about whether they can go ahead with a procedure to remove a fetus from a woman’s body.

Texas health lawyer Leah Stewart, who advises doctors and hospitals about the abortion laws, agreed that if a woman thinks she is having a severe miscarriage or another dangerous complication like an ectopic pregnancy or if her water breaks long before viability, then she should go to a large urban hospital.

They see “every single thing that goes wrong … and are better equipped to connect the right provider and give the woman standard care.”

And if you aren’t getting the attention you need quickly, she added, “You have to keep ramping up your fit throwing.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Dallas-area father whose wife nearly died when she miscarried with what would have been their second child at 13 weeks pregnant.

After multiple visits to medical centers over three days and three rounds of treatment with misoprostol, Hamilton’s wife passed out unconscious on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

She only survived because Hamilton raced her to a hospital ER for treatment.

“”Women are dying… under the circumstances we went through.. If I wouldn’t have been home to find my wife, she would have been one of those women… I could have lost her….it’s like, ‘oh my God, I really could have.’ That’s reality and that’s hard,” Hamilton added.