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A Texas Woman Died After Waiting 40 Hours for Miscarriage Care
(www.propublica.org)
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Texas state law allows abortion in cases of medical emergencies. The hospital was absolutely in the wrong here.
The hospital knew that they had to protect themselves against the jagoffs who prosecute people who provide women with healthcare.
The law is what created this situation; if the doctors and hospital administration didn't have to worry about the fascists in the State government, this never would have been an issue.
Or do you just think the doctors didn't perform the procedure because they didn't feel like it?
Read your own link.
So, the words say that they can help, but because they (very intentionally) made the definitions of 'life threatening condition' and 'Substantial impairment of a major bodily function' undefined, there is no legal way for a doctor to bring harm to a fetus with a heartbeat without exposing themselves to the draconian Texas penalty laws https://guides.sll.texas.gov/abortion-laws/civil-penalties
The physician believed that a medical emergency had taken place, and therefore it would have been legal. And would you rather face legal consequences, or watch someone die in front of you because you could help them but didn't?
I hope all that doctor's other patients feel as morally superior as you do.
I hope the lawyers who gave the doctor this horrible advice get fired.
The woman died of sepsis. It’s extremely likely when you have a dead or dying fetus hemorrhagically working its way out of a uterus, but until you have it, you don’t. By the time people realize what’s going on, it’s often too late.
The law is disgusting because it is medically uninformed and constraining, and it assumes anyone considering abortion is just some gleefully slutty baby murderer.
The problem is that legal jargon and medical jargon are very different animals. The legal is deliberately ambiguous, and the medical is hyper-specific... so doctors are left scratching their heads about things like "is the white blood cell count high enough for a lawyer to call this life threatening?" "Is the blood pressure low enough?" meanwhile the mother waits and dies.
"During a medical emergency" or "life threatening" are copouts that don't actually mean shit, and no doctor is going to risk going to prison to find out.
Sure sure. Perfectly legal to do an abortion in Texas in a case of a medical emergency.
And then the case gets reviewed by a board of religious zealots who believe unwanted pregnancies (and by extension, pregnancy related deaths) are part of their god's divine plan. They determine if this was an abortion, or a murder. In Texas, a state where the only thing liberal is their application of the death penalty.
Can you see why what the law says and what the law does can be very different?
The definition of emergency is absurdly specific though. The corpse inside you can't just be dead, it can't just be decomposing, the fragments of putrefying corpse matter must be coursing through your blood at a sufficient concentration before anything can legally be done.
If she dies, then it was an emergency and you should have saved her. Jail.
If she doesn't die, then it wasn't an emergency and you shouldn't have done the abortion. Jail.
So, therein lies the problem.
They couldn't take action before her life was in danger even though they knew it would be. So they have to wait until it's an "emergency" which is far more risky. And this woman died was a result.
This law greatly increased the risk of the situation needlessly.
Notice how that law is vague on the medical emergency aspects. When exactly is a women with an nonviable pregnancy a danger to the mother?
"Life-threatening condition" is a fairly wide umbrella. Given the number of people who die of sepsis every year, that sounds like a life-threatening condition to me. A substantial impairment is defined under federal law. Sepsis would likely also count there, too - it messes you up real badly, after all.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/texas-judge-allows-woman-get-emergency-abortion-despite-state-ban-2023-12-07/
That threat was because she could have sought a C-section. If I'm understanding this page correctly, one's fertility is reduced by about 13% after a C-section. If I'm not, feel free to show me how I got it wrong. Did that guy ever end up prosecuting anyone involved, though? Why would a judge side with the prosecution after a court literally gave her an order permitting her to do that?
This happened prior to the version of the law you posted.