In films and TV shows, you sometimes see people who are really angry or upset smash things by throwing them across the room or sweeping them off tables. I have never done such a thing or know people who have done so and felt that it may be artistic license taken by directors to show extreme anger. But the most recent story from ProPublica about yet another woman who dies because of the abortion bans was so infuriating that it made me better understand why someone might do something like that.
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.
But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.
“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.
Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.
In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.
…There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.
Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.
No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.
…Some said the first ER missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. All said that the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis hadn’t improved. And when she returned for the third time, all said there was no medical reason to make her wait for two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.
“This is how these restrictions kill women,” said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. “It is never just one decision, it’s never just one doctor, it’s never just one nurse.”
It is infuriating to read such stories about the needless deaths of women due to the extreme anti-abortion laws that now exist in many states.
Anti-abortion extremists got much of what they wanted, the overthrow of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the passing of extreme abortion bans in many states. What they haven’t got is their professed main goal and that is a reduction in the number of abortions. In fact the number of abortions have increased since 2022. But what they have achieved is an increase in the number of women who die because they developed health complications while pregnant because doctors would not treat them because of the abortion bans.
These people never give up on their attempts at curbing women’s rights. Last year, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment by referendum that enshrined the right to abortions in the state constitution. But Ohio lawmakers keep trying to enforce the anti-abortion laws that they passed following the repeal of Roe in 2022. They were taken to court and judges ruled against them.
An Ohio judge has decided that the state’s ban on most abortions was unconstitutional and could not be enforced.
Judge Christian Jenkins of the Hamilton county common pleas court also granted a permanent injunction in his ruling on Thursday.
Jenkins said that Ohio’s abortion prohibition flouted language in a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution that protected reproductive healthcare.
“Ohio voters have spoken. The Ohio constitution now unequivocally protects the right to abortion,” Jenkins said in his ruling.
Jenkins’s decision stems from a law that prohibited doctors from performing abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac or embryonic activity. This activity can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
…“This is a momentous ruling, showing the power of Ohio’s new Reproductive Freedom Amendment in practice,” Jessie Hill, cooperating attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said. “The six-week ban is blatantly unconstitutional and has no place in our law.”
There is no question that we need a federal law that provides equal access to women across the nation so that they do not have this absurd situation where their lives are put in danger simply because they happen to live in a backward state.
Be careful of your shoulder and elbow joints.
The number of stories of pregnant women being murdered in Red state hospitals makes me want to throw a whole lot of things way too often.
AFAICT, in places like Texas, the cruelty and death are the whole point of their laws.
Nothing says, “We have power over you” more than “We can kill people and no one can stop us.”
It is all very fundie xian.
This is a lie.
Federal law is always dominant over state law.
If we had a legitimate Supreme Court, we could be certain that Federal law would be supreme. However, the conservative majority explicitly declined to rule on whether that was the case in Idaho v. US. During argument, the conservative majority was very sympathetic to Idaho’s arguments, but eventually ruled against them on procedural grounds without addressing the merit. Many suspect they will rule differently after the election, when similar cases are sure to be brought in the future. Until they clarify an appropriate case on the merits, doctors have a legitimate fear that they can be prosecuted in regressive conservative states like Texas.
That needs to be tested in court. The family have to sue.
The word “professed” is doing and awful lot of work in that sentence, as I’m sure is the reason you put it there.
More abortions and more dead (mainly poor/brown/both) women is not a bug, it’s a feature.
So, what did you throw? Rick kicked a wall and hurt his foot.
This is why we need a change in the law in the UK to say specifically that abortion is a medical matter between the pregnant person and their doctor(s). We should include trans care too, as that also ought to be between an individual and their doctor(s).
I did used to throw things when I was angry, from when I was fourteen months old and I threw something at my new brother when he was brought home. I stopped in my teens after nearly seriously injuring the same brother, I threw a small brass bell with sufficient force to dig 3 cm into a wooden banister about 3m away which he was behind. It shocked me so much I have never lost my temper to that extent again.
As you may have noticed, none of this seems to shock Republicans. The reason is simple. This was the expected result. This was the obvious and only possible result. They intended this result.
They knew it would happen because it already had, just a couple months shy of 10 years before the SCOTUS decided to selectively ignore everything they didn’t care to see. So they could overturn Roe v. Wade. In 2012 there was an Indian woman living in Ireland. Her name was Savita Halappanavar* and she was murdered by Irish anti-abortion laws. In Ireland, this was a shock that kicked off changes to the laws that killed her.
In the US, we hear similar stories now in backwards parts of our country but there is no matching concern from Republicans. Because this was expected. This was the known outcome. In other words, this could only be the intended result.
* The truth is I don’t remember her name. The handful of times since then I’ve felt like bringing her tragic death up to make a point I’ve had to look her up. But it’s really easy. “ireland abortion ban indian woman” put into a search engine brings her right up. This trivial amount of effort is all it would take for every single one of these dishonest people to know exactly what abortion bans do -- they kill women.