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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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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.
There's already been at least one doctor in Texas who risked legal consequences for performing an abortion, and he won out. And given that twelve other physicians stated a premature delivery should have been done, it's plain that something should have been done. Now she's dead, because apparently the hospital staff misunderstood a rather clearly-written law.
Any doctor that performs an abortion in Texas is risking a minimum $100,000 fine and permanently losing there license to practice medicine if lawyers, who are not medical professionals, decide it was medically necessary yet.
As a result, doctors in TX have been advised by their lawyers not to perform abortions unless the mother is literally minutes away from death, because otherwise you can’t prove that it was medically necessary.
In the case, the patient died of sepsis. Doctors couldn’t perform the abortion when she needed it because they couldn’t prove that it was medically necessary yet.
They knew that not performing the abortion would put mom at a much high risk of dying later. But they couldn’t legally prove that risk exists because all pregnancies involve some degree of risk.
If you want doctors to perform medical procedures when it’s medically necessary, you need doctors making that decision, not lawyers, not the state. That’s what Texas had before this law went into effect.
It’s literally created a trolly problem, it’s now better for the doctors to let some women die so they can save more lives later.
But we have "over a dozen" medical experts who say it would have been the correct decision, and the law explicitly allows it. If it's so obvious that over a dozen experts who never spoke to the patient could know it was the right decision, then how does a competent doctor actually interacting with the patient not know that?
Yes.
That’s the problem with this law.
It takes the decision away from the medical experts, and puts in the hands of lawyers and judges who may or may not have a different agenda.
The lawyers/judges would want to throw physicians in prison? And as of 2023, no doctors had actually been arrested for doing this. Actually, at least one got a case dismissed after the fact.
I can see you’re clearly not interested in understanding the situation the physician was in or discussing solutions that would have saved this patient’s life.
I’m not going to debate you further.
The article says what would have saved her life, so I didn't think that was at issue here. But alright. It was good talking to you, and I hope you have a good day.