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.
If they accept the patient, and the patient needs an emergency abortion, then they could face legal consequences for providing one, or face losing their license for denying critical care.
Either way, if such a circumstance happens, the doctor is completely fucked, and they’d rather keep their job, and help other people.
There’s confusion about what is and isn’t allowed, which isn’t helping. Doctors don’t know what they could be sued for. Its in their best interest to not see patients like this. Doctors need protections at least, but governments have specifically taken steps to make them liable, and this confusion and refusal is part of the plan to make abortions this scary thing.
I live in a country where all abortions are banned. This sort of thing doesn’t happen here. Do you know why that could be? Time?
In the US, abortions are legal in some states and severely punished in other states. As a result, OB/GYN doctors have been physically moving en masse from the latter states to the former states.
This has left the latter states with an acute shortage of OB/GYNs. And if a hospital does not have an OB/GYN who can treat a patient, they will not admit an OB/GYN patient to the hospital.
But doesn’t the article say that there were doctors, but that they refused to perform their job?
In some states you have to be in the process of “life at risk” before treatment now, or the doctor could be jailed. Lots of articles about this, women nearly dying, losing their reproductive organs, etc. It’s all very dehumanizing.
The article says that ER doctors wouldn’t perform jobs that required OB/GYN training.
Because women that need abortions don’t go to regular doctors.
Well they don’t do that in Texas either, do they?