The woman arrived at a Texas hospital so ill she couldn’t walk. Her last pregnancy caused heart failure, and the new pregnancy put her at immediate risk of cardiac arrest, according to a Rewire interview with Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, the physician who cared for the woman. But hospital administrators refused to give the woman an abortion. She wouldn’t die right then, they reasoned, so she wasn’t really “dead enough” to justify life-saving care. The woman had no insurance and no other realistic options for life-saving care. She left the hospital and Dr. Moayedi never learned what happened to her.
Her story is not an outlier. Women across the nation who need life-saving abortion care or miscarriage treatment may not receive it. And thanks to “conscience laws,” they might not even know they need the care.
Denying Life-Saving Care to Women in Public Hospitals
Many people have heard about Catholic hospitals that deny abortion care to women in need. But what few may realize is that public hospitals in 11 states are also restricted from providing abortion care. While some states offer exceptions to save the patient’s life, ethics boards and administrators who fear government sanctions may be unwilling to undertake the risk of performing any abortions. In some states, such as Arizona, there is no specific exception for life-saving care. Hospitals are supposed to leave women to die.
These rules extend to treatment for miscarriage. The medical procedures to treat miscarriages are technically abortions. This means a woman could be left to carry a dead fetus and hope that it expels on its own, while facing a mounting risk of infection and bleeding with each day that the miscarriage does not happen naturally.
It seems obvious that denying a woman life-saving care is medical malpractice. In the majority of states, however, a woman’s right to sue hospitals or doctors who refuse to provide them medically necessary abortions is limited or nonexistent. A study published this week in JAMA finds that 46 states had laws that protected providers who deny women abortions. Twenty-six states place no limit on the right of a clinician to refuse to perform an abortion.
What Happens to Women Denied Care?
Numerous studies have found that women denied abortion care have worse outcomes on virtually every measure. The Turnaway Study, which compares women denied abortions to those who were able to receive them, links being denied an abortion to worse mental and physical health, a greater risk of remaining in an abusive relationship, and a higher risk of living in poverty or requiring government assistance.
Women denied life-saving abortion care suffer even more. At Catholic hospitals, so-called conscience rules may forbid providers from telling women that their pregnancies or doomed or that an abortion is the only way to survive. The media is littered with stories of women who hemorrhaged or suffered other catastrophic complications after a Catholic hospital denied them miscarriage care.
Tamesha Means was 18 weeks pregnant when she had a miscarriage. The hospital turned her away, refusing to treat her or end the life-threatening pregnancy. Tamesha developed a serious infection, but the hospital’s physicians did not tell her about it.
Because women are often turned away and sent home to suffer or even die, we don’t know what happens to most of them. The poorest women suffer the most because they rarely have alternative options for care, and are more likely to seek care at hospitals that limit or forbid abortion.
Killing Women for ‘Life’
Far-right protesters picketing outside of and occasionally bombing abortion clinics claim they don’t hate women. They just want to save babies. Republican lawmakers who support them insist they only want to preserve life. But these pregnancies are doomed from the start. The fetus will die no matter what. The only questions is whether the woman has to die, too.
The people who claim to care about life can easily answer that question: The woman needs to die, too. There’s only one side of the abortion debate that advocates killing living, breathing human beings. There’s only one side that advocates leaving children orphaned or motherless.
Anti-abortion politics are not about life. They’ve never been about life. They’ve always been about punishing women for getting pregnant, for getting sick, for needing care, and sometimes for just being women.