US abortion bans blamed for delays
To avoid getting into a costly and time consuming legal mess, a Louisiana hospital’s lawyer told a doctor not to perform surgery on a woman who had a miscarriage at the 16th week of pregnancy.
Instead of a relatively simple 15-minute procedure, the woman had to endure a painful hourslong labor to push the dead fetus out of her body.
The United States Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24 has led to flickering access to abortion in Louisiana because of a statewide trigger ban. The ban has taken effect twice and been blocked twice by a court so far.
In a lawsuit filed against the state by the patient, her doctor Valerie Williams provided an affidavit that illustrated how an abortion ban could delay or deny healthcare for women suffering miscarriages.
In her affidavit, Williams said when the abortion ban was in effect in early July, the patient broke water and it was too early for the fetus to be viable.
Williams said she was told not to perform a surgical procedure known as D&E (dilation and evacuation) by the hospital, and she had to watch while her patient “was forced to go through a painful, hourslong labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, despite her wishes and best medical advice”.
Williams also said the patient took hours to deliver the placenta, began hemorrhaging and lost nearly a liter of blood before she could stop the bleeding.
“She was screaming — not from pain, but from the emotional trauma she was experiencing,” Williams said in the affidavit. “There is absolutely no medical basis for my patient, or any other patient in this state, to experience anything like this. This was the first time in my 15-year career that I could not give a patient the care they needed.”
Her affidavit also described a patient who became pregnant despite using birth control and sought an abortion soon after the Supreme Court decision.
“She told me that she hoped the pregnancy was ectopic so she could get treated in Louisiana, rather than having to leave the state,” said Williams, referring to a pregnancy in which the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus and must be removed.
Timely care at risk
However, even an ectopic pregnancy will not necessarily guarantee timely care in abortion-ban states. In central Texas, a physician was allegedly instructed to not treat an ectopic pregnancy until a rupture occurred, which puts the patient’s health at serious risk, according to the Texas Medical Association, or TMA.
In a letter to the regulatory Texas Medical Board two weeks ago, TMA officials said they have received complaints, citing the above case as an example, that hospital administrators are stopping doctors from providing medically appropriate care to patients with some pregnancy complications due to an abortion ban.
They asked the board to “swiftly act to prevent any wrongful intrusion into the practice of medicine”.
Many pregnant women are finding out how difficult it has become to obtain medical care under abortion bans. One Houston woman suffered a miscarriage and had to carry the dead fetus inside her body for two weeks before getting proper care.
Marlena Stell, a beauty YouTuber with 1.47 million subscribers, tearfully shared her ordeal on her YouTube channel.
She moved to Houston from Washington state last year. She found out that the fetus was dead in a routine ultrasound check when she was 9.5 weeks pregnant last fall. She first cried, and then asked for a standard D&C (dilation and curettage) procedure.
D&C is also used for abortion. Due to Texas’ abortion ban, the doctor told her that she had to get another ultrasound to confirm the miscarriage before any medical care could be provided.
By the time she was arranged to have the procedure, it had been two weeks since she found out the fetus was dead.