Editor’s letter

With about 1 in 4 pregnancies ending in miscarriage, treatment for pregnancy failure is a crucial aspect of prenatal care. But as Lauren Leader points out in Politico this week (see Best Columns, p.12), in post-Roe America, miscarriages are now going untreated, with disastrous consequences for American women. Abortion is now banned outright in 14 states and restricted after 15 or fewer weeks in six more. While the bans generally include some type of exception to save a mother’s life, in practice those provisions don’t work. Doctors still fear that they might be prosecuted if they use techniques such as D&C, or dilation and curettage, which is also used in abortion. The result is that women whose doomed pregnancies threaten them with sepsis have been told to wait to get more seriously ill so they will be close enough to death to qualify for treatment. Texas woman Amanda Zurawski did, in fact, go into sepsis and lost a fallopian tube, making it harder for her to conceive again. Carmen Broesder, an Idaho mom, suffered through 19 days of a painful miscarriage—going to the ER three times— because doctors would not perform the D&C she needed.

North Carolina, where I live, now bans abortions after 12 weeks, and I’ve already seen the consequences. A friend of mine here with a wanted pregnancy that went terribly wrong in the 18th week had to travel several states away to get a termination—driving while in pain, her baby dying inside her. And what about the women who can’t afford the time and expense of travel? Lawmakers in many states have already reacted to such stories with anguish and regret, saying that they never intended their constituents to be unable to access routine prenatal health care. But the simple truth is that abortion has always been part of that care. It can’t be separated out without harm to pregnant women that nobody, whether pro-life or pro-choice, would wish.

Susan Caskie

Managing editor