Posted on 08/12/2024 7:08:06 AM PDT by Miami Rebel
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bleeding and in pain, Kyleigh Thurman didn’t know her doomed pregnancy could kill her. Emergency room doctors at Ascension Seton Williamson in Texas handed her a pamphlet on miscarriage and told her to “let nature take its course" before discharging her without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy. When the 25-year-old returned three days later, still bleeding, doctors finally agreed to give her an injection intended to end the pregnancy. But it was too late. The fertilized egg growing on Thurman’s fallopian tube would rupture it, destroying part of her reproductive system. That’s according to a complaint Thurman and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed last week asking the government to investigate whether the hospital violated a federal law when staff failed to treat her initially in February 2023. “I was left to flail," Thurman said. “It was nothing short of being misled.” Even as the Biden administration has publicly warned hospitals to treat pregnant patients in emergencies, facilities continue to violate the federal law. More than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms were turned away or negligently treated since 2022, an Associated Press analysis of federal hospital investigations has found. Two women – one in Florida and one in Texas – were left to miscarry in public restrooms.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
These women belong in church praying for forgiveness.
The larger issue is whether medical providers interpret restrictive abortion laws as limiting their ability to treat patients who present with ectopic pregnancies, which can be life-threatening.
How providers respond could depend on how “abortion” is defined under state laws.
Medical v. legal definitions of ‘abortion’
The definition of an abortion varies depending on the medical source or expert consulted. Legal scholars tend to approach the matter differently than those in the medical community — the patient’s intent to terminate is key in this discussion.
The National Institutes of Health defines an abortion as a procedure “to end a pregnancy.”
Harvard Medical School describes it as a “removal of pregnancy tissue, products of conception or the fetus and placenta (afterbirth) from the uterus.” Harvard clarifies that other terms for abortion include “elective abortion, induced abortion, termination of pregnancy and therapeutic abortion.”
The Mayo Clinic specifies the treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is not a medical abortion, which it defines as “a procedure that uses medication to end a pregnancy.” It adds that a medical abortion can be used “to complete an early miscarriage or end an unwanted pregnancy.” When it comes to legal definition, however, what constitutes an “abortion” is often dictated in part by whether the patient made a conscious decision to terminate the pregnancy.
According to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School an “abortion is the intentional termination of a pregnancy.”
Abortion laws across the states have used similar definitions. An Ohio law includes “the purposeful termination of a human pregnancy by any person.” A law in North Dakota defines it as “the use or prescription of any substance, device, instrument, medicine, or drug to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of an individual known to be pregnant.” Most of the medical experts we talked to were clear that they don’t consider ectopic treatment an abortion.
The lack of consensus over the definition for an abortion makes defining the treatment for an ectopic pregnancy confusing and it can have real-world implications.
“I think the reason this is coming up right now is because of the vague wording of so many of these laws, and I think that is what the general public and clinicians and lawyers are all kind of grappling with,”Addante said. “As a doctor, I would not, before a week ago, have considered the treatment of an ectopic pregnancy to be an abortion.”
All of the 18 states expected to ban abortion following the overturning of Roe v. Wade have exceptions for the life of the patient or a medical emergency. Even so, experts say the vagueness of these laws could lead to complications with access to treatment for ectopic pregnancies.
“These laws will have a chilling effect on clinicians, because they don’t want to be accused of committing a crime,” said Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at University of California San Francisco. “They may wait until the clinical presentation evolves to the point where it’s really clear that the person’s life is at risk, for example, waiting until the fallopian tube may have ruptured before intervening. That would be very bad medical care.”
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that this has already been the case for health care providers in Texas, where a restrictive abortion law, with an exception for the life of the mother, went into effect in September 2021.
Most pregnancy-related care is extremely time-sensitive, especially when it comes to treating an ectopic pregnancy.
“When people are unclear about what these laws mean, and you’re talking large penalties for physicians, you know, loss of license, jail time, felony charges,” Addante said. “The delays that are occurring as they seek legal clarity to make sure that they can legally do what they know to be medically right, it’s really dangerous for that patient.”
Doctors need to know that they won’t suffer repercussions when they provide what has always been considered a basic and acknowledged standard of medical care.
The standard of care is a benchmark used in medicine to determine whether the professional obligations to patients have been met by a healthcare provider. Failure to deliver the standard of care may be deemed medical negligence.
Standard of care is a legal term—not a medical one—defined by law and regulated by state administrative agencies. The laws governing the standard of care can vary by state. If the standard of care is not met, a patient can file for medical malpractice and seek damages in court.
It can be argued that pro-life states, by enacting vague and poorly written statutes, have given the pro-abortion side more - and better - ammunition.
The take-away for the average person who reads the AP article is going to be that abortion bans are too restrictive, and that they compromise the quality of care for pregnant women. Whether they actually do isn’t the issue. The perception is what people will remember.
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