A very old tactic
They used to burn witches, didn’t they? Well, now they are sacrificing women for their anti-abortion zealots in a new way:
In Wisconsin, a group of doctors and lawyers is trying to come up with guidelines on how to comply with a newly revived 173-year-old law that prohibits abortion except to save the life of a pregnant woman. They face the daunting task of defining all the emergencies and conditions that might result in a pregnant woman’s death, and the fact that doctors could be punished with six years in prison if a prosecutor disagrees that abortion was necessary.
A similar task force at an Arizona hospital recommends having a lawyer on call to help doctors determine whether a woman’s condition threatens her life enough to justify an abortion. Already, the hospital has added questions to its electronic medical forms so they can be used to argue that patients who had abortions would have died without them.
And in Texas, oncologists say they now wait for pregnant women with cancer to get sicker before they treat them, because the standard of care would be to abort the fetus rather than allow treatments that damage it, but a state law allows abortion only “at risk of death.” Some hospitals have established committees to evaluate whether a pregnancy complication is severe enough to justify an abortion.
Two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion, the medical consequences extend far beyond abortion clinics and women seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. Doctors who never thought of themselves as “abortionists,” to use the language of the court’s decision, say the criminalization of abortion is changing how they treat women who arrive in emergency rooms and on labor and delivery floors with wanted but complicated pregnancies.
During the 50 years of Roe, abortion became the standard of care in many medical situations. Now, laws ban it or make it unavailable in about half the states, usually with exceptions only for rape and incest or to save the life of the pregnant woman. While a few states have attempted to specify conditions that qualify, the laws are generally vague and have failed to account for every possibility. With lawmakers attempting to regulate medical procedures, medical providers say they have to think like lawyers.
“A lot of us go into emergency medicine because of the imperative to take care of every patient — the person without housing and a C.E.O. — and we’re really proud of that ethical obligation to say, ‘Here’s the patient in front of me and I’m going to do everything I can for them,’” said Dr. Alison Haddock, an emergency physician in Houston and chair of the board of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Now, she said, “We’re no longer basing our judgment on the clinical needs of the woman, we’re basing it on what we understand the legal situation to be.”
Physicians would more typically talk to hospital lawyers about guardianship when caring for elderly or psychiatric patients, Dr. Haddock said. Now, when patients arrive with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages or hemorrhaging — all situations where abortion has been established as standard care — the questions for the lawyers are more pressing: “Do we wait until the fetus is definitely dead, or is mostly dead good enough?” she asked. “If they’re telling us to wait for the condition to be fully emergent, how much bleeding is too much?”
“Having to consult a lawyer in an emergent situation is a whole new ballgame,” she said.
This 15 week ban that Lindsey Graham is proposing would only make this happen in all 50 states instead of just those with far right legislatures and courts.
The title of Lindsey Graham’s abortion ban — the “Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act” — is a messaging mishmash, even as the overall message (ban all abortions) is evident from the circumstances.
On the one hand, the term “late-term abortion,” as opposed to the right-wing preferred “partial birth abortion,” is an attempt to mainstream it. But 15 weeks isn’t “late term” in any scenario.
The “pain-capable” part is clearly aimed at the base; for years they’ve linked abortion bans to claims that the fetus experiences pain.
I think also the Senate GOP is nervous about the base, because the base is mad that even some Senate GOPers are considering the Respect for Marriage Act. Both bills have to be viewed together to understand dynamics here.
But the bottom line here is that the GOP wants a national abortion ban, knows it needs to propose one to satisfy the base, knows it is deeply unpopular with everyone else, and is going to mishmash message it in hope of confusing people.
Don’t be confused. And also:
Regarding the nervousness:
Previously:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/christian-right-same-sex-marriage-senate-roe
Originally tweeted by Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) on September 13, 2022.