Pregnant People Are Facing a GOP-made Crisis in Emergency Rooms
Since 2022, due in part to the confusion and ambiguity over state abortion laws, over 100 pregnant people have been denied or delayed life-saving care, according to a new report from the Associated Press.
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In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and close to half of states have imposed total or near-total abortion bans, pregnant people across the country have suffered horrific consequences, as doctors weigh the threat of prison time with providing life-saving, stabilizing health care. On Monday, the Associated Press published a new report that identified over 100 cases of pregnant people turned away from emergency rooms since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health in 2022. In some cases, they’ve been forced to miscarry in public bathrooms, denied emergency abortions for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, or made to wait for several hours in waiting rooms while experiencing urgent pregnancy complications.
In Arkansas, the AP cites an unnamed woman who “went into septic shock and her fetus died after an emergency room sent her home.” A different woman in Texas similarly went into sepsis last year after she was denied emergency abortion care for a nonviable pregnancy; she nearly died before the hospital finally induced labor to end the pregnancy. In California, where abortion is legal, one pregnant woman who needed a blood transfusion was forced to wait for nine hours in an emergency waiting room.
One of the women identified in the AP’s report, Kyleigh Thurman of Texas, filed a legal complaint to the Biden administration this week against the hospital that denied her treatment for her ectopic pregnancy in 2023. Abortion is the only treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, which is a nonviable, potentially life-threatening condition that occurs when a fertilized egg develops outside the uterine wall, often in the fallopian tubes, and is incompatible with life. Still, the hospital delayed providing treatment—seemingly due to the state’s abortion laws—to Thurman until it was too late, requiring a procedure to remove one of her fallopian tubes and severely jeopardize her fertility moving forward. Thurman is one of four women the AP identified who were denied timely emergency care for ectopic pregnancies.