One woman miscarried in the restroom lobby of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.
“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care – this is inconceivable.”
It’s happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.
Thanks! Your reply is what finally made me fully “get it”.
The states mention in the article say that you can only abort if the mother’s health is in danger, or in the cases of rape and incest. If you’re treating a pregnant woman and she’s in critical condition, you might be faced with having to do an abortion. If you do it, the courts might say the woman wasn’t in enough danger. If you don’t, the courts might say you caused the patient’s death.
Where I live, abortion is 100% banned (hooray for Catholicism). In some other comments in this chain, I asked why that might now happen here.
This is why. To hell if your house is burning, you are not allowed to put it out. Therefore this choice doesn’t happen and the gynecologists just do their job, or at least try to.