Right to life only really applies to the zygotes, embryos and fetuses. No one else need apply
“Right to life” zealots insist that pregnant patients must be bleeding out and literally on the verge of death before a doctor can provide life saving procedures:
In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers are considering whether patients should be forced to continue dangerous pregnancies, even while miscarrying, under the state’s abortion ban — and how close to risking death such patients need to be before a doctor can legally intervene.
At a legislative hearing last week, a lobbyist who played a dominant role in crafting the state’s abortion legislation made his preference clear: A pregnant patient should be in the process of an urgent emergency, such as bleeding out, before they can receive abortion care.
Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” Will Brewer, who represents the local affiliate of the anti-abortion organization National Right to Life, told a majority-male panel of lawmakers Feb. 14. When faced with a patient’s high-risk condition, doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.”
Top Republicans like Gov. Bill Lee have defended the state’s abortion law, one of the strictest in the country, as providing “maximum protection possible for both mother and child.” But currently, the ban has no explicit exceptions, not even for the pregnant patient’s health.
It only includes an “affirmative defense” for emergencies, a rare legal mechanism that means the burden is on the doctor to prove abortion care was necessary because the patient risked death or irreversible impairment to a major bodily function.
The penalties for getting it wrong are three to 10 years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines. Doctors could expect to lose their medical license just for being charged. Concern over how the unprecedented law will be interpreted by prosecutors and the courts has already resulted in patients with high-risk conditions having to rush across state lines for care.
Some Republicans are proposing a modest change. An amendment to the law introduced in the House Population Health Subcommittee last week would remove the affirmative defense and clarify that it is not a crime to terminate a pregnancy to prevent an emergency that threatens the pregnant patient’s life or health, among other provisions.
“No one wants to tell their spouse, child or loved one that their life is not important in a medical emergency as you watch them die when they could have been saved,” said Republican Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, a nurse and the bill’s sponsor.
But the word “prevent” is a sticking point for the anti-abortion groups who wrote the law.
“That would mean that the emergency hasn’t even occurred yet,” Brewer told the committee. He made a distinction between immediate, urgent emergencies — “A patient comes into the ER bleeding out” — and what he calls “quasi-elective” abortions.
Brewer, who has no medical experience, defined those as “abortions that aren’t necessary to be done in the moment but are still performed in an effort to prevent a future medical emergency.” He called for an “objective” standard.
When reached for comment, Brewer said his statements as summarized by ProPublica had been mischaracterized but did not provide additional details. “Ending the life of the baby should not be used as treatment for non-life-threatening conditions or to prevent some unknown possibility in the future,” he said. He did not respond to follow-up questions seeking clarification.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said laws that try to limit or define medical exceptions are dangerous because they interfere with a doctor’s ability to assess fast-moving health indicators in unpredictable situations and don’t account for people’s different thresholds for risk.
Kim Fortner, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist practicing in Tennessee for more than 20 years, testified to the committee and pushed back on Brewer’s characterizations. She described a patient she saw recently whose water broke too early — the fetus still had a heartbeat, but there was virtually no chance it would survive and a very high risk the patient would get an infection.
But because of the law, the woman was sent home without the option of abortion care. She came back with emergency bleeding and sepsis, a life-threatening infection.
“It is not always so clear, and things don’t always just work themselves out,” Fortner said. “It is a significant, in my mind, misuse of resources, if she did not need to have six units of blood that could have gone to the trauma victim or the gunshot wound. Blood is a limited resource. Just because she can wait and come back in and she still lives to talk about it today — one, that won’t always happen, and two, it also is a significant misuse of an ICU bed. It is a preventable occurrence.”
Andy Farmer, a Republican state representative, agreed with her.
“These things need to be addressed early on,” he said, adding that he didn’t want doctors to feel they needed to consult a lawyer before offering care that could stop a condition from progressing into an emergency.
Brewer, however, said he believed giving doctors that kind of power would be too subjective. “Once one doctor is let off the hook in a criminal trial, it would be open season for other doctors who wanted to perform bad faith terminations,” he said.
Brewer’s position appears to be out of step with public opinion on abortion, even in a deeply red state. A recent poll found about 75% of Tennesseans support abortion exceptions, including for pregnancies caused by rape and incest.
Yet his organization exerts outsize influence on Republican state politics. Tennessee Right to Life issues an annual scorecard rating lawmakers on their fealty to “pro-life” positions and plows money into primary campaigns to unseat candidates viewed as insufficiently loyal. Already, they retracted the endorsement of one Republican lawmaker who publicly advocated for clear medical exceptions.
If they haven’t made it clear before now that these nuts believe that women should die rather than ever get an abortion for any reason this should confirm it. That is the goal. No abortions ever, regardless of he consequences to the birthing vessel involved. or the fact that the fetus will die anyway (or in some cases is already dead.)
Some Republicans seem to feel a teensy bit uncomfortable with all that but I’m sure they will fold once they realize these maniacs will work to deny them another term. Nothing is more important than that. I mean, how many women are actually going to die because of this? A few thousand? They never said we wouldn’t get our hair mussed …