U.S. Senate discusses problems in states that limit abortion access
19 January 2024
Abortion is healthcare, but it is also freedom. That’s why every abortion denied is a tragedy. And, increasingly, Americans understand that. They don’t want the government involved in their decisions about pregnancy at any point. Jessica Valenti
This essay highlights the recent briefing on abortion rights by US Senators Murray, Schumer, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Baldwin, Warren and Cortez Masto about limitations to the healthcare of women and girls in antiabortion states.
“As an OB-GYN I know firsthand that everyone’s reason for needing an abortion is valid and personal,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Texas physician who is one of the women suing the state over its abortion laws. “Even planned, prayed-for pregnancies can end in abortion.”
Dennard said she’s heard from patients who are fearful about starting a family or growing the size of their family over concerns that if something goes wrong and they need an abortion, they’ll have to travel out of state. Others worry they wouldn’t have the resources or time away from work to travel to end their pregnancy should something go wrong.
Anti-abortion laws, Dennard said, have “taken so much joy out of what should be an enormously joyful chapter in someone’s life.”
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The second case is about the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA, a federal law that requires hospitals to determine if a patient has an emergency medical condition, then to provide stabilizing treatment or transfer the patient if the hospital cannot help them.
The 1986 law should protect doctors in states with strict anti-abortion laws if they perform an abortion as a stabilizing treatment for an emergency medical condition, according to the Biden administration.
An emergency medical condition includes diagnoses that would result in either “serious impairment of bodily functions,” or “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,” or “placing the health of the individual (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of the woman or her unborn child) in serious jeopardy,” according to the law.
That Supreme Court case stems from Idaho’s laws regarding when and how patients can access abortion care.
Dr. Serina Floyd, an OB-GYN who works as chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood in Washington, D.C. and who is a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, said she doesn’t understand why Republican politicians are targeting EMTALA.
“The fact that you would deny someone emergency care that could save their life makes no sense,” Floyd said. “If the idea is to be able to promote life, that is counter-intuitive because now the life of that pregnant person is potentially going to be lost as well as any potential for any future possibility to have children.”
Floyd said research shows negative repercussions for patients denied access to abortion.
“Evidence shows that women denied abortion care are more likely to experience serious medical conditions during the end of pregnancy, more likely to remain in violent relationships and more likely to experience economic hardships and financial insecurity,” Floyd said.
Anyone who has the ability to become pregnant could end up needing an abortion, Floyd told senators at the briefing.
What health care providers need, Floyd said, is for “zero political interference” in how they treat their patients.
“Patients are fully equipped to be able to make complex decisions about their health and their lives,” Floyd said. “They are able to make decisions about themselves and their families in conjunction with their providers. There is absolutely no need for interference from any government.” News From The States
Despite Republican assurances that cases like Dr. Dennard’s are the result of legislative growing pains, or doctors simply not understanding the law—despite claims that their bans just need to be “tweaked” or “clarified”—I want to make clear that all of this pain and suffering was not just expected. It was planned for.
Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists would have voters believe that they had no idea this is what post-Roe America would look like.
But they had 50 years to plan for this moment, and they made that plan carefully, strategically and callously.
Every raped child forced to give birth, every cancer patient denied care, and every woman arrested after having a miscarriage, was accounted for and strategized over.
But with Americans getting angrier and angrier at what abortion bans are doing to their families and communities, Republicans are desperate to hide that truth from voters.
They need us to believe that they’re not the cruel extremists their laws show them to be. And they certainly don’t want us to know that they planned for women’s deaths in the same way they strategize over a talking point or a poll.
And I mean that literally.
For months, I’ve been tracking a conservative campaign to sow distrust in maternal mortality numbers. Republicans know that the data is going to show that their laws kill women, and so they’re preemptively claiming maternal death numbers aren’t accurate.
Some states have even disbanded their maternal death review committees entirely. And because the people most likely to die are the most marginalized among us, their hope is that no one will care.
I’ve also documented how the anti-abortion movement laid the groundwork, over months, to blame doctors for women’s deaths: as if the people working under threat of losing their license or jail time are the problem, and not the laws that prevent them from doing their jobs.
All of which is to say: when Republicans feign surprise or compassion over post-Roe horror stories, they are lying.
They knew that women would suffer and die as a result of their laws, they decided it was a tradeoff worth making, and everything they’ve done since Roe was overturned has been in service of hiding that fact.
Most of those lies are hiding in plain sight. When Republicans tell Americans that the national 15 week ban they’re proposing is a ‘reasonable middle ground’, they leave out the fact that the law would force women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term.
Their ‘compromise’ would do to any American capable of pregnancy what Texas tried to do to Kate Cox. And again, this isn’t an oversight—it’s a deliberate part of a much broader extremist strategy.
Right now, there is a quiet but well-funded campaign led by the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country that is focused entirely on pressuring and forcing women to carry doomed pregnancies to term.
They’re not only trying to do away with exceptions for nonviable pregnancies—they’re trying to eradicate prenatal testing altogether. It’s a lot easier to force women to carry a dying fetus to term if they never get diagnosed to begin with. Jessica Valenti
As physicians, we must advocate for appropriate healthcare for our patients. Although medicine is typically apolitical, in this case, the politics is clear - Republican public officials are denying necessary healthcare to women and girls and Democratic public officials are doing what they can to make it accessible. As healthcare providers, we must do what we can to support public policies that help our patients.
My related essays:
“Of course they want us dead”, 10 January 2024
November 2023 update on Dr. Caitlin Bernard and related issues, 9 November 2023
How red states are torturing pregnant women, 25 October 2023
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