"How imminent must death be?” That’s the question Dr. Lisa Harris, an obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) and faculty member at the University of Michigan, needs answered. She wants to be able to provide the best possible emergency care to pregnant patients, care that might—in the minds of forced-birther extremists—be considered an abortion. Harris needs to know because the answer will tell her if she could end up in jail for trying to save a patient’s life.
There are many reasons why people decide to have an abortion. It’s no one’s place to judge them—the decision should belong to the patient. Although we’re going to focus here on a particular set of circumstances where an abortion, or care that in some way might resemble an abortion, is an absolute medical necessity, this is not to say that all other abortions are somehow less acceptable. The bottom line is that the newly implemented radical laws restricting abortion care harm people in intended and unintended ways, and it's an outrage.
