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Texas adopts democratic socialism after woman nearly tortured to death by GOP

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Oh sorry, that was just a dream Liz Bruenig had last night. What actually happened was this:

I was 18 weeks pregnant when I knew something was wrong. My body was leaking thick and yellowish discharge, and my pelvis felt what I could only describe as abnormally “open.” 

A shockingly brief examination later, I was diagnosed with an “incompetent cervix”—a condition in which the cervix prematurely dilates, usually during the second trimester of pregnancy and often leading to premature birth. 

The loss of my daughter, I was told, was inevitable. What happened next was not. 

It was evident from the moment my doctor saw my bulging amniotic sac that this was not a question of if I would lose my baby—the baby my husband and I wanted so badly and had worked for 18 months with the help of science and medicine to conceive. It was a question of when.

If we had conceived the previous year when we began our journey with infertility, or if we lived in a different state, my healthcare team would have been able to treat me immediately and end my doomed pregnancy as soon as possible, without risk to my life or my health. I wouldn’t have had to wait in anguish for days for the inescapable ill fate that awaited. But this was August 23, 2022, in the state of Texas, where abortion is illegal unless the pregnant person is facing “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy.” Somehow, any medical help to make the horrific inevitability of losing my beloved child 22 weeks early less difficult qualified as an illegal abortion. 

My doctor outlined the roadmap in no uncertain terms: I could wait however long it took to go into labor naturally, if I did at all, knowing that my baby would be stillborn or pass away soon after; I could wait for my baby’s heartbeat to stop, and then we could end the pregnancy; or—most alarmingly—I could develop an infection and become so sick that my life would become endangered. Not until one of those things happened would a single medical professional in the state of Texas legally be allowed to act. It was a waiting game, the most horrific version of a staring contest: Whose life would end first? Mine, or my daughter’s?

I knew I was going to lose my baby. And I knew it could be days—or weeks—of living with paralyzing agony before we could move forward. 

People have asked why we didn’t get on a plane or in our car to go to a state where the laws aren’t so restrictive. But we live in the middle of Texas, and the nearest “sanctuary” state is at least an 8-hour drive. Developing sepsis—which can kill quickly—in a car in the middle of the West Texas desert, or 30,000 feet above the ground, is a death sentence, and it’s not a choice we should have had to even consider. But we did, albeit briefly.

Instead, it took three days at home until I became sick “enough” that the ethics board at our hospital agreed we could legally begin medical treatment; three days until my life was considered at-risk “enough” for the inevitable premature delivery of my daughter to be performed; three days until the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals were allowed to do their jobs. 

By the time I was permitted to deliver, a rapidly spreading infection had already claimed my daughter’s life and was in the process of claiming mine.

This story illustrates how the post-Roe situation in America in regard to even what used to be called “therapeutic abortion” is going to be far, far worse than the pre-Roe world.

During the first half of the 20th century, there were tens of thousands of therapeutic abortions — abortions performed out of at least putative medical necessity — in the USA every year. This was for two reasons:

(1) In the early decades of the century, a wide range of medical conditions actually did pose severe health risks to pregnant women who remained pregnant. Therefore even strictly construed laws that only allowed abortions to “save the life” of the pregnant woman could and were interpreted to permit relatively large numbers of legal abortions.

(2) By the mid-20th century, the medical situation was changing rapidly. Pregnancy was becoming a much less dangerous medical condition for women in general and women with what were formerly much more dangerous pre-existing conditions in particular. This created a tension in the practice of therapeutic abortion: It started to become clear that many doctors and hospitals were using a much more liberal interpretation of the statutory phrase “the life of the woman” than a strict construction of that phrase implied. “Life” would sometimes be construed implicitly as something like “life or health,” or even “quality of life,” so that many abortions which would not have been legal under a strict construction were being performed by “respectable” doctors and hospitals — not on the gray or black market in other words — in at least potential violation of the law, strictly construed.

This situation led hospitals in the 1950s to form review panels — similar to the one in the story above — to insulate individual doctors from potential legal liability, even though in practice prosecutions of “respectable” doctors for carrying out therapeutic abortions were practically unknown. These panels were on the whole less likely to approve therapeutic abortions than the previous system had been, so that by 1960 or so there were probably around 10,000 to 15,000 legal abortions being performed per year in the USA, i.e., likely a significant decline from the comparable figure a couple of decades earlier (reliable statistics in this area are not surprisingly difficult to obtain). This in turn represented something between 1% and 5% of all abortions in the US at the time.

Still, it’s a deeply imbedded cultural myth that, prior to the abortion reform movement of the late 1960s and then Roe in 1973, abortion in the USA was illegal, with the exception of a very strictly construed “life of the woman” provision. Those provisions were, prior to the 1950s, often very loosely construed; and even in the 1950s and 1960s they were, it’s safe to say, far more loosely construed than they are going to be in post-Roe America. Indeed it’s likely that a woman like the author of the essay above — who is both white and married — would have had far less trouble terminating her pregnancy literally anywhere in pre-Roe America than she did in the state of Texas in 2022.

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