The GOP Is in Full-Blown Crisis Mode After the Alabama IVF Ruling
Slate, February 26, 2024
To the fellas in the Republican Party: Are we having fun yet with post-Dobbs reproductive rights policy? As was not unexpected after Dobbs, a state Supreme Court (Alabama’s in this case) has determined that frozen embryos have personhood rights, prompting the state’s largest hospital to halt IVF treatments for fear of legal repercussions. This is a fully insane situation. The vast majority of everyone supports access to IVF as practiced. But–but but but!–this is the sort of outcome you will get when you enshrine into law that personhood begins at the moment of fertilization, and that’s a litmus test for many Republican candidates. And so, over the past week, we’ve seen them tripping all over their own faces trying to discuss the decision. Here’s Nikki Haley last week in her cleanup effort, fumbling, blind, for oxygen: “I didn’t say that I agreed with the Alabama ruling. What the question that I was asked is, ‘Do I believe an embryo is a baby?’ I do think that if you look in the definition, an embryo is considered an unborn baby.” In the course of a single conversation, meanwhile, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville said he was “all for” the ruling, then said the pause on IVF treatments in Alabama was “really hard” and that we “need more kids.” Then he diverted to “I’d have to look at the entire bill, how it’s written” (what bill?) and finally landed on: “This is a state issue.” Yeah, no kidding! Other politicians who had a hard time responding to this news included Sen. Tim Scott, who dodged the issue with a simple “Well, I haven’t studied the issue,” despite the fact that he, like Tuberville, co-sponsored Rand Paul’s 2021 “personhood bill,” which would have likely banned IVF.
An Ectopic Pregnancy Put Her Life at Risk. A Texas Hospital Refused to Treat Her
The Washington Post, February 23, 2024
Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz tried not to cry as the doctor in the emergency room delivered one of the most frightening diagnoses a pregnant woman can receive. The 25-year-old college senior was told she likely had an ectopic pregnancy, a highly dangerous condition where the embryo implants outside of the uterus. Without immediate treatment, the fallopian tube can rupture – and the patient can die. The law that has prohibited abortions in Texas since Roe v. Wade was overturned now explicitly allows doctors to treat ectopic pregnancies. But when doctors at Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital evaluated Norris-De La Cruz last week, they refused to terminate the pregnancy, saying there was some chance the pregnancy was still viable, Norris-De La Cruz recalled. Instead, they advised her and her mother to go home and wait, according to medical records reviewed by The Washington Post. Norris-De La Cruz ultimately received emergency surgery about 24 hours later at a different hospital in the area, at which point her ectopic pregnancy had already started to rupture. The OB/GYN who performed the procedure said that, if Norris-De La Cruz had waited much longer, she would have been “in extreme danger of losing her life.” “I was scared I was going to … lose my entire reproductive system if they waited too long,” Norris-De La Cruz said in an interview two days after her surgery. “I knew it could happen at any moment.” Her case highlights a chilling reality of post-Roe America: Medical exceptions to abortion bans have not stopped doctors from turning away patients with significant pregnancy complications, often with harrowing consequences.
Their States Banned Abortion. Doctors Now Say They Can’t Give Women Potential Lifesaving Care
ProPublica, February 26, 2024
Sitting at her computer one day in late December, Dr. Sarah Osmundson mustered her best argument to approve an abortion for a suffering patient. The woman was 14 weeks pregnant when she learned her fetus was developing without a skull. This increased the likelihood of a severe buildup of amniotic fluid, which could cause her uterus to rupture and possibly kill her. Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who helps patients navigate high-risk pregnancies, knew that outcome was uncommon, but she had seen it happen. She drafted an email to her colleagues on the Nashville hospital’s abortion committee, arguing that the risk was significant enough to meet the slim exception to Tennessee’s strict abortion ban, which allows termination only when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” She pleaded with her fellow doctors to spare this woman the gamble when her baby wasn’t even viable. Then came the replies. One doctor wasn’t “brave enough.” Another urged her to consider the optics – approving an abortion in this case could be seen as “cavalier” and trying to circumvent the law. “I’m saying this because I care about you and your personal liberties,” the doctor said. To Osmundson, the responses reflected just how much abortion bans had warped doctors’ decision-making and forced them to violate the ethics of their profession, which require acting in the best interests of their patients.
Abortion Shield Laws: A New War Between the States
The New York Times, February 23, 2024
Behind an unmarked door in a boxy brick building outside Boston, a quiet rebellion is taking place. Here, in a 7-by-12-foot room, abortion is being made available to thousands of women in states where it is illegal. The patients do not have to travel here to terminate their pregnancies, and they do not have to wait weeks to receive abortion medication from overseas. Instead, they are obtaining abortion pills prescribed by licensed Massachusetts providers, packaged in the little room and mailed from a nearby post office, arriving days later in Texas, Missouri and other states where abortion is largely outlawed. This service and others like it are operating under novel laws enacted in a half-dozen states – Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, New York and California – that have sought to preserve abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in June 2022. The laws have been in use only since the summer and have not been tested in the courts, but they are already providing abortion access to tens of thousands of women in states with bans, especially low-income patients and others who cannot travel. Called telemedicine abortion shield laws, they promise to protect doctors, nurse practitioners and midwives licensed in those six states who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in the nearly two dozen states that ban or sharply restrict abortion. The laws stipulate that officials and agencies of their states will not cooperate with another state’s efforts to investigate or penalize such providers – a stark departure from typical interstate practices of extraditing, honoring subpoenas and sharing information, legal experts on both sides of the abortion issue say.
Restrictive Abortion Laws Disproportionately Impact Black Women in GOP-led States, New Democratic Memo Notes
CBS News, February 26, 2024
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the campaign arm that helps elect Democrats to state legislatures, is circulating a new memo in order to highlight what it says is the disproportionate impact of abortion bans on Black women in GOP-led states. Such bans provoke strong emotional responses from Democratic Black women state lawmakers – sadness, distress, but not surprise. “It is sad, but it is not surprising. You know, the abortion bans – and certainly since the fall of Roe – have really jeopardized the health of women in general,” New York Senate President Pro Tempore Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat, told CBS News. “And because the Black maternal mortality rates are already alarmingly high, nationally, these bans have only exacerbated the overall reproductive health problems that Black women face. So it’s sad. It’s terribly disappointing.” Black women have the highest abortion rate in the U.S., according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abortion restrictions that have gone into effect across the U.S. since the Supreme Court ended federal protections for the procedure have only exacerbated previously existing socioeconomic disparities, abortion access advocates say. “Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Black and Brown people were bearing the brunt of abortion restrictions. Abortion coverage bans like the Hyde Amendment fall hardest on Black and Latinx people, who are more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid,” said Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, a group that works to ensure abortion access.
ICYMI: In Case You Missed It
Dr. Zahedi-Spung with @PRHdocs explains how abortion restrictions across the country are worsening OB/GYN shortages and impacting medical schools’ ability to provide quality and accurate training. This will undoubtedly worsen maternal health outcomes.
— National Partnership (@NPWF) February 28, 2024
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Note: The information contained in this publication reflects media coverage of women’s health issues and does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
