Abortion bans are inherently incompatible with valuing access to medical treatment for pregnant women and mothers

Another woman has died as the direct result of Texas’s ban on abortion:

Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”

Hope dialed his mother, a former physician, who was unequivocal. “You need a D&C,” she told them, referring to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for first-trimester miscarriages and abortions. If a doctor could remove the remaining tissue from her uterus, the bleeding would end.

But when Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, finally arrived, he said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue, Hope recalled. Hope trusted the doctor. Porsha took the pills, according to records, and the bleeding continued.

Three hours later, her heart stopped.

The 35-year-old’s death was preventable, according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica. Some said it raises serious questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and reach for less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Doctors and patients described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.

And in Texas in particular it’s undeniable that this is an intended consequence of the law.

And this isn’t the only way abortion bans affect the health of pregnant women and mothers:

Texas authorities are not keeping track of the exodus of doctors, at least not officially. Yet among practitioners there is a quiet sense of doom. “The pipeline is drying up,” Charles Brown, a maternal-fetal expert and a former Texas regional chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said. A growing number of residents who trained in the state were leaving, Brown told me, and many established doctors were contemplating it, too. “We’re just not going to have enough people to take care of women in this state,” he said.

A report released last month by Manatt Health, a health-care consultancy based in Los Angeles, confirmed Brown’s fears. Manatt surveyed hundreds of ob-gyns in Texas to examine the impact of abortion bans. Seventy-six per cent of respondents said that they could no longer treat patients in accordance with evidence-based medicine. Twenty-one per cent said that they were either considering leaving the state or already planning to do so; thirteen per cent had decided to retire early. The report found “historic and worsening shortages” of ob-gyns, which “disproportionately impact rural and economically disadvantaged communities.” As in the Rio Grande Valley, the bans were shrinking the field’s future workforce: residency programs across Texas have seen a sixteen-per-cent drop in applications.

It turns out that given other options doctors tend not to want to work in states where they are threatened with being imprisoned for performing life-saving medical care.

And this is why the perpetual hope among so many pundits that the American anti-abortion lobby will pivot to social democracy are so misguided. It’s not just that the Republican Party is strongly opposed ideologically to increasing access to medical care, it’s that draconian abortion bans in themselves make the medical care available to pregnant women and mothers worse by definition. Obfuscating these obvious truths is doing a disservice to the many people who suffer because of these bans.