'Tip of the iceberg': Bans in states with abortion restrictions leading to preventable deaths - Deadline - MSNBC

[Rhiannon12866]

Ziva Bransetter, Senior Editor for ProPublica, Mini Timmaraju, President of Reproductive Freedom for All, and Dr. Kavita Patel join Nicolle Wallace on Deadline: White House to discuss the troubling and horrific reports of women who need emergency care being denied what is medically necessary because health care providers are in practicing in states with extremely restrictive abortion laws. - Aired on 09/17/2024.

[usaf-vet]

1. This is not a story from the SIXTIES! I know this first hand. In the mid sixties while living and working in a.....

..... population that was predominantly comprised of young families starting their pregnancy years and military families living on and off base.

I was a USAF surgical scrub tech during those four years, 1965-1969. We would get called out day and night to perform surgical procedures to save the lives of the newborn and the mother.

I can't speak about the outcome of every case, as there were six to eight scrub techs.

But I can say that in the cases I scrub, we never lost the mother or the child.

I suspect those figures were the same for other techs.

Any death in the OR would have gone through "an after-action review," which involved the entire surgical team from top to bottom.

Not all the cases ended with perfect results. Most often, ectopic pregnancy would end up with the loss of at least one side of a fallopian tube and ovary. In cases where the tube had ruptured, it often ended up with abdominal sepsis—requiring an extensive "flushing" of the belly.

Our surgical teams comprised young doctors and nurses aged in the late twenties to the late thirties.

The surgical scrubs were mainly between 20 and 24, as most enlisted for four years. There were also career-enlisted techs and nurses.

I enlisted right out of high school at 18 and was discharged at 22.

It was an honor and a joy to be part of a newborn's birth. We did it better and safer in the '60s.

At age 77, I am angered by the disregard for the lives of the babies AND the mothers today. Politics has no place in these life-and-death decisions.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. Wow! Thank you so much for sharing your story!

And you can be extremely proud of the lives - both mothers and babies - that you cared for and saved. If only present day Republicans had the respect and value for the lives that you and your young colleagues did. Times sure have changed - as has the Republican party. And I agree that one's politics should have no place in health care - nor should those with no medical training have any right to make these anti-human laws, they're "anti-life."