Senate Democrats Roll Out Resolution on Emergency Abortions, Bans Killing Women

Sen. Patty Murray introduced a resolution simply stating—not legislating—that patients have a right to emergency care including abortion under federal law.

By Kylie Cheung  |  September 20, 2024 | 2:38pm
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Senate Democrats Roll Out Resolution on Emergency Abortions, Bans Killing Women

This week, we learned the stories of the first maternal deaths which a state maternal mortality committee deemed “preventable” and caused by abortion bans. Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, both Black mothers from Georgia, died because they were unable to receive timely access to an emergency abortion and afraid to seek an emergency abortion, respectively—both due to the state’s six-week ban.

In response, on Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced a resolution affirming that every patient has a right to emergency health services, which, for pregnant patients, can include abortion. On the Senate floor, Murray recounted the Georgia women’s stories and stressed that they “died because Republican bans denied and delayed the care they needed.”

Murray’s resolution comes after, over the summer, the Supreme Court ruled in a case on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), a decades-old federal law that states Medicare-funded emergency rooms must offer stabilizing care to patients—including, if necessary, abortion. The court ultimately punted the decision, allowing Idaho hospitals to temporarily offer some emergency abortions, but ultimately sending it back to a lower court in a confusing turn of events.

Murray’s resolution, supported by Senate Democrats including Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, affirms that emergency abortions for pregnancy complications are indeed a right under federal law—and that dangerously complicated, ambiguous laws and court rulings threaten pregnant people’s lives. “The chaos and confusion caused by abortion bans and restrictions can dissuade providers from providing appropriate medical care to patients,” the resolution states.

In Murray’s remarks, she continued, “We are talking about women whose water breaks dangerously early, or who are experiencing uncontrollable hemorrhage, sepsis, or pre-eclampsia.” We’ve already seen several such cases, like Amanda Zurawski in Texas, who contracted and nearly died from sepsis because she couldn’t receive a timely, emergency abortion for her nonviable pregnancy, resulting in the permanent closure of one of her fallopian tubes. Meanwhile, Louisiana is set to enact a new law banning the most common forms of medication abortion pills; this means hospitals will no longer readily have access to misoprostol, which is essential to stop postpartum hemorrhage—the most common cause of maternal mortality.

“Dying women being turned away from an emergency room, being left to bleed out—left to grow sicker, left to miscarry on their own. The lucky ones—the lucky ones—get airlifted to a state like mine where abortion is legal and protected,” Murray said. “By July of this year, one hospital in Idaho—next to my state—had already airlifted six pregnant women out of the state for emergency abortion care.” Also in Idaho, state officials said in June that despite the Supreme Court’s temporary ruling in support of some emergency abortions, the state has already “lost nearly a quarter of our OBGYNs, over half our maternal and fetal medicine specialists, and three labor and delivery wards.”

Earlier this month, the research organization ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health) of the University of California, San Francisco published a study of dozens of anecdotes from physicians about how abortion bans have impeded their ability to provide standard medical care. Many patients almost died, or suffered long-term health consequences from pregnancy complications that could have been prevented with timely abortion care, or had to travel out-of-state under unbearable circumstances—because physicians were unsure what they could or couldn’t do under criminal abortion bans.

This is the legal and medical landscape in which women and pregnant people die.

In its reporting on Thurman and Miller this week, ProPublica notes that most state maternal mortality committees, which operate on a two-year lag, are only now beginning to work on maternal deaths that took place after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. This is why Georgia’s maternal mortality review’s findings arrive about two years after Miller and Thurman’s tragic, preventable deaths. Their stories are likely just the beginning.

Murray called on Senate Republicans to co-sponsor her resolution and acknowledge “that this is a problem,” adding, “Let’s see who takes me up on that offer. I am waiting to see.” The resolution comes as, just weeks out from the election Senate Democrats have been trying to put Republicans on record on their extreme positions on everything from IVF and the right to interstate abortion travel, to, now, emergency, life-saving abortion care.

 
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