Texas Sues New York Doctor for Telemedicine Prescription of Abortion Pills
NBC News, December 13, 2024
Texas sued a New York physician for prescribing a woman abortion pills, according to a lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Ken Paxton. In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Collin County, Paxton said that Margaret Daley Carpenter, a New York doctor, provided mifepristone and misoprostol, a pair of abortion-inducing drugs, to a 20-year-old pregnant woman there, which led to a medical abortion. The lawsuit asked the court for an injunction barring Daley from providing abortion pills to pregnant patients in Texas and requested civil penalties in the amount of $100,000 for each violation of the state’s laws. Paxton’s filing said that Carpenter is not licensed to practice medicine in Texas and argued that by conducting telehealth visits in Texas, she was violating a state administrative code requiring that physicians who treat and prescribe patients in the state hold full Texas medical licenses.
Supreme Court To Weigh State Moves To Cut Off Medicaid Funding to Planned Parenthood
U.S. News, December 18, 2024
The Supreme Court said Wednesday it will consider South Carolina’s move to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, the latest abortion-related case since the justices overturned Roe v. Wade. The court agreed to take up the state’s appeal of a lower-court ruling focused on whether Medicaid patients can sue over their right to choose their own qualified provider. The case will be argued in the spring. South Carolina moved in 2018 to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. The organization uses Medicaid funding for family planning health services rather than abortions, but Gov. Henry McMaster said any public money sent there “results in the subsidy of abortion.” Medicaid does not pay for abortion except in cases when a pregnant woman’s life is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Planned Parenthood has previously said it gets less than $100,000 in South Carolina, one of many conservative-leaning states that sought to halt or reduce public funding for the nation’s largest U.S. abortion provider.
For Many Rural Women, Finding Maternity Care Outweighs Abortion Access Concerns
The 19th, December 18, 2024
In what has become a routine event in rural America, a hospital maternity ward closed in 2023 in this small Oregon town about an hour from the Idaho 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 preeclampsia 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 JAMA in early December that examined nearly 5,000 acute care hospitals found that by 2022, 52% of rural hospitals lacked obstetrics care after more than a decade of unit closures. The health implications of those closures for young women, the population most likely to need pregnancy care, and their babies can be significant. Research has shown that added distance between a patient and obstetric care increases the likelihood the baby will be admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. Nationally, reproductive health care services of all types tend to be limited for people in rural areas, even within states that protect abortion access. More than two-thirds of people in “maternity care deserts” – all of which are in rural counties – must drive more than a half-hour to get obstetric care, according to a 2024 March of Dimes report. For people in the Southern states where lawmakers installed abortion bans, abortion care can be up to 700 miles away, according to a data analysis by Axios.
Are Abortion Bans Across America Causing Deaths? The States That Passed Them Are Doing Little To Find Out
ProPublica, December 18, 2024
In states with abortion bans, ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound 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. But panels in states that have recently imposed strict bans on abortion have done little to uncover whether the laws are contributing to maternal deaths, including tracking delays in care for pregnancy complications and making these problems known, a ProPublica investigation shows. In fact, we found that in a few states, political leaders who backed the bans have stood in the way of measuring their consequences. They have dismissed committees, slowing down their work. They have weeded out members openly critical of abortion bans and supportive of transparency. Texas has gone as far as to legally prohibit its committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related. This could include some miscarriage care, health officials told ProPublica. Other state committees have not made changes to systematically examine the role abortion bans are playing in maternal deaths, officials acknowledged, though some said they might note it as a contributing factor if it appears in the records. “If the committee discovers a trend that raises a particular concern, it could decide to include that information in its reports,” South Carolina officials said.
Study Finds More TV Depictions of Abortion This Year – But They’re Still Mostly Getting It Wrong
NPR, December 18, 2024
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 released Wednesday 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, 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. For the first time, a slight majority of characters having an abortion, 51%, were people of color. That’s an increase from last year, but not reflective of the most recent data. According to data collected by the Guttmacher Institute in June 2021–July 2022, about 30% of people obtaining an abortion were Black, 30% Latinx and 30% non-Hispanic White. Four percent were Asian and 7% were another race or more than one race.
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