Hospitals are facing questions about why they denied care to pregnant patients and whether state abortion bans have influenced how they treat those patients.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, sent inquiries to nine hospitals ahead of a hearing Tuesday looking at whether abortion bans have prevented or delayed pregnant women from getting help during their miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or other medical emergencies.
Republicans on Tuesday assailed the hearing, with outright denials about the impact abortion laws have on the medical care women in the U.S. have received, and called the hearing a politically-motivated attack just weeks ahead of the presidential election. Republicans, who are noticeably nervous about how the new abortion laws will play into the presidential race, lodged repeated complaints about the hearing’s title, “How Trump Criminalized Women’s Health Care.”
Hospitals and healthcare workers are not getting enough scrutiny on this issue. Ultimately, the fault lies with Trump and the Supreme Court. They made the policy change which has led to the preventable deaths of women. But it’s also true that it is a doctor’s job to help people, and waiting until women are near death to provide treatment because they fear legal exposure is antithetical to the job that every reasonable person expects them to do.
I understand that being a doctor is hard, and that they are faced with incredibly difficult decisions every day. But if a woman is bleeding out in front of you, it’s literally your job to try to save her, immediately. Waiting for her to get worse, for even a minute, is immoral and not what patients expect of their doctors.
The risk analysis is really bad for those in abortion ban states. You can face a malpractice suite for allowing a pregnant woman to bleed out, which your insurance will cover, or you can face murder chargers for performing am illegal abortion, which can be 20+ years in jail or even capital murder.
And we cannot expect them to make that choice. They are not to blame and people should not be shifting the blame that must lie with the political elite who constantly push these evil restrictions.
That’s really upsetting. I tend to forget that the healthcare industry in the US has to rely on cold hard calculations like this in the background. It really takes the person out of the patient.
Emergency doctors should have some kind of qualified immunity like what cops have, but the opposite, really, because it should protect them from prosecution when they make a medical decision that results in someone’s life being saved. The law shouldn’t even be a consideration when someone is dying in front of you and you have the ability to save them.
I’m biased but putting the onus on doctors here completely misses the point in my opinion. Let me just point out that this isn’t a “policy change” - these states have made it illegal to perform these procedures. In at least one state the physician can go to prison.
In an idealistic worldview we can expect every person to do the morally optimal thing every time without regard to consequences but that simply isn’t realistic. You are basically advocating that physicians should be jumping to break the law and therefore endanger themselves. That just is not a realistic expectation of any person.
Tl;dr - Physicians are just people and are not the ones that created this situation. They are normal people and expecting them to sacrifice career/freedom to help one patient is beyond what is realistic.