For many of those affected by the June 2022 fall of Roe v. Wade, the consequences were harsh and immediate: Some states automatically inflicted “trigger laws” upon their residents. These laws more or less outlawed most abortions immediately, forcing patients to travel out of state to obtain the procedureif they had the financial means and support systems to do so. As a predictable result, individual horror stories began to appear in the news almost immediately.
Meanwhile, the systemic impact that overturning abortion rights has had on this nation’s health care operations has largely gone under the radar. Doctors charged with managing pregnancies have been understandably loath to speak out against laws which can, in many cases, brand them as hardened criminals for exercising routine medical judgment and treatment. And because viable statistics necessarily take time to accumulate, the transformation of the medical profession itself caused by these laws has been far less visible, instead cloaked in hushed discussions between hospital staff and their legal departments.
Predictably, Texas has proudly led the way in criminalizing the termination of pregnancy. In their zeal to block any avenue of escape for anyone who might seek abortion care, Texas’ Republican legislators have joined other states in passing “heartbeat” statutes, which ban any medical procedure to terminate pregnancy after the presence of a so-called “fetal heartbeat” has been detected. Unfortunately, the panoply of genetic and other deformities and conditions that can potentially result in stillbirth or miscarriage seldom do their damage in tandem, so many patients are put in a position where their fetus will certainly die but will not die immediately—sometimes placing the patient at dire risk. To accommodate this, Republicans in Texas and other states have magnanimously decreed that a fetus may be terminated if it is necessary to “save the life of the mother.”
The problem? There is no fine line defining exactly when a pregnant patient is at “death’s door,” so to speak. Consequently, doctors in Texas and other states with such laws are now forced to huddle with their lawyers and risk management departments to determine when it is okay to act to save that patient’s life.
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