Are abortion bans across the United States causing deaths? The states that passed them are doing little to find out
-A woman died after being told it would be a crime to intervene in her miscarriage at a Texas hospital
-A pregnant teenager died after trying to get care in three visits to Texas emergency rooms
-The same political leaders who enacted abortion bans oversee the state committees that review maternal deaths. These committees haven’t tracked the laws’ impacts, and most haven’t finished examining cases from the year the abortion bans went into effect.
In states with abortion bans, ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and ended up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies. These are the very kinds of cases state Maternal Mortality Review Committees are supposed to delve into, determining why they happened and how to stop them from happening again. The criminals that should be on trial are the state of Texas and all the others who have banned legal abortions.
SOURCE: Propublica, by Kavitha Surana, Mariam Elba, Cassandra Jaramillo, Robin Fields, Ziva Branstetter, 18 December 2024
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Hospitals rarely advise doctors how to treat patients under abortion bans
Doctors described hospital lawyers who “refused to meet” with them for months, were hard to reach during “life or death” situations and offered little help beyond “regurgitating” the law, according to a US Senate Finance Committee report.
As doctors navigate risks of criminal prosecution in states with abortion bans, hospital leaders and lawyers have left them to fend for themselves with minimal guidance and, at times, have remained “conspicuously and deliberately silent,” according to a 29-page report released Thursday by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden. The poor direction is leading to delays in emergency care for patients facing pregnancy complications, the report concluded.
Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, launched a probe in September in response to ProPublica’s reporting on preventable maternal deaths in states with abortion bans. Wyden requested documentation from eight hospitals to see whether they were complying with a federal law that requires them to stabilize or transfer emergency patients…
SOURCE: ProPublica, by Kavitha Surana, 19 December 2024
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U.S. House of Representatives members want answers on Texas’ decision not to review maternal deaths after near-total abortion ban
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas led on a letter calling for a briefing on why Texas has failed to review 2022 and 2023 maternal deaths.
Members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability are asking Texas’ Maternal Mortality Committee to brief them on the controversial decision not to review pregnancy and childbirth related deaths during the first two years after the state banned nearly all abortions.
The Maternal Mortality Committee had announced in September that it would not review deaths from 2022 and 2023, instead jumping ahead to 2024. At a recent meeting, Committee Chair and Houston Ob/Gyn Dr Carla Ortique defended the decision as necessary to offer more contemporary recommendations on reducing maternal deaths.
SOURCE: Texas Tribune, by Eleanor Klibanoff, 19 December 2024
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Doctors should put caring for their patients above following the law
Doctors are ethically required to provide healthcare that is consistent with modern medical standards. If the law requires them to provide worse care—such as what’s happening with restrictive abortion laws—then the laws are unjust and must simply be disregarded.
Women are dying because a group of unelected right-wing judges voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to an abortion in 1973. The arguments against abortion do not make sense, a majority of people in the USA believe it should be legal, and is important for women’s lives. Instead, women (and infants, too, it now appears) are dying, leaving behind children and spouses and partners and families.
… The article concludes: As long as doctors are willing to withhold care or provide sub-standard care, women will continue to suffer and even die. This is unacceptable. Doctors are going to have to start breaking these laws.
SOURCE: Current Affairs, by Lily Sánchez, 18 December 2024
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… At the same time, for many rural women, finding maternity care outweighs abortion access concerns
In what has become a routine event in rural America, a hospital maternity ward closed in 2023 in a small Oregon town about an hour from the Idaho state border. For Shyanne McCoy, 23, that meant the closest hospital with an obstetrician on staff when she was pregnant was a 45-mile drive away over a mountain pass. When McCoy developed symptoms of pre-eclampsia in January, she felt she had the best chance of getting the care she needed at a larger hospital in Boise, Idaho, two hours away. She spent the final week of her pregnancy there, too far from home to risk leaving, before giving birth to her daughter.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in early December found that, after more than a decade of hospital closures, 52% of rural US hospitals lacked obstetrics care by 2022, creating “maternity care deserts” where pregnant people must travel more than half an hour to get obstetric care. This article shows how maternity care and abortion care, both of which are needed at different moments in the lives of women and girls, may cause conflict because providers of services may feel they cannot provide both, and may end up abandoning the one in order to maintain the other.
SOURCE: 19th News, by Lillian Mongeau Hughes, 18 December 2024.
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Study finds more TV depictions of abortion this year — but they’re still mostly getting it wrong
PHOTO: Nicole Rivelli/Max
There were more abortion plotlines on TV this year – 66 across 63 shows, compared to 49 last year, according to the annual Abortion Onscreen report by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research program on abortion based at the University of California San Francisco.
Despite the increase in on-screen portrayals of abortion, however, they largely do not mirror reality, said Steph Herold, a researcher for the study. She thinks it’s a missed opportunity, especially as consumers try to make sense of changes to state laws.
“People are more confused than ever about whether abortion is legal in their state or not, whether it’s legal in the country or not, about what they have to do to get an abortion if they want one,” she said. “Do they need to cross state lines or not? Will they get in trouble?” Meanwhile, on TV…
Key findings in the 2024 Abortion Onscreen report:
For the first time, a slight majority of characters having an abortion, 51%, were people of color. That’s an increase from 2023, but not reflective of the most recent data. According to data collected by the Guttmacher Institute in June 2021–July 2022, about 30% of those obtaining an abortion were Black, 30% Latinx and 30% non-Hispanic White. Four per cent were Asian and 7% were another race or more than one race.
One-third of the TV plotlines depicted the political, logistical and financial barriers to abortion.
As in past years, the vast majority of characters having an abortion (89%) don’t have children. But the Guttmacher Institute reports that 55% of abortion patients have had at least one birth prior to their abortion.
A majority of characters on TV were portrayed as middle class (46%) or wealthy (21%). According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Some 41% of people obtaining abortions had an income below the federal poverty level and 30% had incomes between 100% and 199% of the federal poverty level.”
Abortions with pills accounted for 63% of all clinician-provided abortions in states without total bans in 2023. On TV, however, there were only two such depictions. Only one of those, Girls on the Bus, marked the first time access to abortion via telehealth was depicted in a scripted TV show.
SOURCE: Elizabeth Blair. National Public Radio, 18 December 2024.