One woman miscarried in the restroom lobby of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.
“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care – this is inconceivable.”
It’s happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.
And in your country I presume the law applies to the entire country, doesn’t vary by state, and wasn’t put into effect in very recent history.
After 10 or 20 years there will be enough legal precedent in each state that doctors and hospitals can formulate policies which will probably keep them safe from prosecution. Right now, they don’t have that capability, because everything is so new. And the only way to find out whether their actions are legal is to try them and see if they get charged and see what the courts say.
It’s important to keep in mind that the states with strict laws against abortion are run by Republicans who really don’t care about the doctors or the women. It’s not like the laws are perfectly crafted to guarantee that patients receive the best possible medical care.
In that case, do you expect these cases to go away with time? Ideally, abortion becomes legal again, but if it doesn’t will time make things at least a little better?