The 'Anti-Life' Implications of State Abortion Bans
GOD DAMN ALL THESE WOMAN-HATING CHRISTOFASCIST THEOCRATIC ENSLAVERS
The ‘Anti-Life’ Implications of State Abortion Bans
3/29/2023 by Shoshanna Ehrlich
Abortion bans across the country are forcing medical providers to choose between their obligation to their patients or possible lawsuits, loss of licenses and incarceration.
Two abortion rights supporters at a New York City demonstration look at posters of people who died from unsafe or illegal abortions. (Joan Slatkin / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
On March 17, Bonner General Hospital—in rural northern Idaho—announced it had made the “difficult decision to discontinue providing obstetrical services.” With this announcement, Bonner joins the steadily declining number of rural hospitals that have obstetrical units. The trending loss of rural hospital-based obstetrical services is generally attributed to factors like the challenges of retaining and attracting medical staff, and declining birth rates. However, in its press release, Bonner General adds a new and chilling variable into the mix—namely “Idaho’s legal and political climate,” faulting it for the fact that “highly respected, talented physicians are leaving” who will be “extraordinarily difficult to replace.”
Although the announcement does not use the word “abortion,” there is no doubt it’s meant to call out Idaho lawmakers for enacting laws that “criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care”—a criminal regime that has earned Idaho the distinction of being one of the most abortion-hostile states in the post-Roe era. Nearly all abortions are already banned in the state, and doctors who provide abortions are guilty until proven innocent. Now state-level Republicans are backing House Bill 242, which passed through the House and is likely to pass through the Senate. The law would create a new crime dubbed “abortion trafficking,” banning traveling out of state to get an abortion and criminalizing anyone transporting a pregnant minor seeking an abortion, outside of and even within the state. (“Technically, they’re not criminalizing people driving in [another] state with a minor. The crime is the time that someone is driving the minor in Idaho,” said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University.)
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This is no surprise, given that—as stated in Bonner’s press release—the consequences “for Idaho physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines.” And while this standard of care may well require the prompt termination of a wanted pregnancy in order to preserve the life, health or future fertility of a pregnant person, “medical providers say they are facing impossible situations that pit their ethical obligation to patients who are dealing with traumatic and dangerous pregnancy complications against the fear of lawsuits, loss of their medical licenses and incarceration.”
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According to the Governmental Accounting Office, closures of hospital-based obstetrical services have been concentrated in “rural counties that were sparsely populated, had a majority of Black or African Americans, and were considered low-income.” It is all but inevitable that this pattern will exacerbate existing racial disparities, with Black women in the United States already being “three and four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women,” and twice as likely to experience severe maternal morbidity.
A grim irony is at play here. Not only are states like Idaho and Texas robbing pregnant women of the right to choose not to have a child, the bans are exposing pregnant people to risks of death, injury and illness—making it less likely that every family who wants to bring children into the world will be able to do so and survive the experience.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/03/29/idaho-texas-abortion-ban-pregnancy-health-women/
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