“With sorrow … we dissent.” Those biting words were written two years ago by liberal Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan in response to the 2022 overturning of the 32-year-old precedent of Roe Vs. Wade, a landmark decision that constitutionalized the right to abortions. A woman’s right to choice and privacy is now no longer enshrined. This “sorrow” becomes more evident by the day; the maternal mortality rate in Red states has risen dramatically. First reported by NBC News, data from the Gender Equity Policy Institute reveals that Texas’s maternal mortality rate has increased by 56% from 2019 to 2022. While Blue states like California have set the right to choice in stone within State law, it’s become abundantly clear that restricting or banning abortion access is actively putting women in danger of lethal infection, bleeding, and even death.
According to the American Center for Progress, in 2022 alone, state legislators introduced 563 provisions to restrict abortion access, with 50 of these provisions actually being passed into law. At least 14 states have in effect near-total abortion bans at any point in pregnancy. Other states ban abortion after 6 weeks, drastically underestimating the timeframe for detection of life as well as many women’s own knowledge of their pregnancies. Some states carry heavy criminal penalties for both abortion providers and patients. The right to choice has been severely disrupted, and as a result, the right of access to reproductive care has been stunted.
Denying women of these rights has proven to be deadly. In Georgia, the preventable deaths of two pregnant women due to delayed care are being investigated. Before the Georgia law was overturned at the beginning of October, physicians could go to prison for performing an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Similar laws are still in place in states like Florida and South Carolina, while states like Kentucky, Oklahoma, Idaho, and more have total abortion bans, where it is only accessible if the life of the mother is in danger.
However, the terms of these provisions are not the only cause of rising maternal mortality rates in Conservative states. Their deaths can also be attributed to the ambiguity in the legal language, whether in the definition of “exception” or the “acceptable” level of danger a pregnant mother can be before accessing abortion care. The problems with ambiguity are exemplified by Kaitlyn Kash’s story, as reported by NBC News. After Kaitlyn became pregnant with her second child living in Austin, Texas, she found out at 13 weeks of pregnancy that their fetus had “severe skeletal dysplasia,” a rare genetic disorder that would likely result in the baby’s bones being crushed during labor. Healthcare providers did not immediately offer Kaitlyn care. Instead, she was told to “get a second opinion, but make sure that it was outside of Texas.” Even though practitioners knew that a diagnosis of severe skeletal dysplasia meant the baby’s chances of survival were incredibly unlikely, Texas providers were still hesitant to provide care. And even when Kaitlyn traveled to Kansas, a state with a much lighter restriction of 21 weeks, she was met with protestors harassing her outside of the medical clinic.
Kaitlyn’s story is tragic. While conservatives tend to paint people who get abortions as irresponsible, or baby haters, Kaitlyn was a mother with her first child and was planning to have more. This shows the illegitimacy in typical abortion rhetoric; being pro-choice includes all women, especially mothers who have children.
This hesitancy on behalf of medical providers to give care has also turned deadly. In Georgia, Amber Nicole Thurman missed an out-of-state abortion appointment due to a traffic jam and was given mifepristone as a substitute for a medical procedure. Mifepristone is a safe and effective drug used to end pregnancy, and it is typically used in combination with misoprostol to end a pregnancy through ten weeks gestation. A 2015 study found that major complications from mifepristone occur in just a third of a percent of individuals who take the medication. Unfortunately, Amber encountered an incredibly rare complication where she was unable to fully expel fetal tissue, and she went to Piedmont Henry Hospital to receive care. In cases like Amber’s, the standard course of action is to provide a Dilation and Curettage procedure, the standard procedure for abortions. However, doctors waited 20 hours to give her the procedure due to the ambiguity of Georgia’s six-week abortion law. Because of this delay, Amber’s body was unable to fight off infection from the complication, with her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail. By the time doctors operated, Amber had died. The hesitancy Amber experienced in receiving care was a result of ambiguous abortion policy language. This 28-year-old woman’s death, and many others throughout the nation, were preventable; had routine care taken place in a timely manner.
While Georgia’s tight restrictions are indeed being scaled back, the damage is already done. Many abortion bans in Conservative states have laws to provide exceptions to prevent the death of the mother or in the cases of rape or incest. Yet these cases are rooted in ambiguous non-medical language, rendering interpretation of the law incredibly tricky. Exceptions are factored in when it’s too late, or they don’t even extend to cases where the fetus will likely die. Even more so, exceptions for cases like rape or incest aren’t always honored. Ten states currently have no exception laws for rape or incest.
In June of 2022, a ten-year-old from Ohio was raped and forced to travel to Indiana to receive an abortion. This situation is incredibly alarming; a young child, regardless of their lack of right to consent, wasn’t able to seek care. As a nation, are we expecting a 10-year-old child to raise a child? To carry a child? To go through the trauma of rape just to endure a further lack of choice stripped away? Even when traveling out of state, Dr. Caitlyn Bernard, the OBGYN who provided care to the child, immediately came under fire. Prominent conservative politicians, including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, questioned Bernard’s credibility, and Bernard was further attacked by Conservative media outlets and on social media. Even worse, Bernard’s daughter faced a kidnapping threat by locals before the story went nationwide, simply because her mother was doing her job. Indiana pro-life organization Right to Life Michiana listed Bernard as a threat before taking down that website page.
Rather than genuinely respond to provider hesitance and continuous accessibility issues caused by abortion restriction, Conservative lawmakers instead act on the offense, attacking providers who come forward with qualms about dangerous barriers towards access to care. Even more so, these stories weren’t enough for Senate politicians to pass a resolution guaranteeing abortion access to “protect a pregnant person’s life.” GOP politicians like Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) continue relying on false claims, insisting that exemption laws hold true nationwide and that “no state criminalizes miscarriage” on the Senate floor.
This is, in fact, wrong; stories and arrest records nationwide reveal many incidents of women being arrested and charged with felonies after miscarriages. Brittany Watts’s 2023 arrest was a prime example of this. After her pregnancy was found not viable at 21 weeks, Watts miscarried in her bathroom days later. Rather than respond to her obvious distress – she had been leaking fluid for days before her miscarriage – authorities soon arrested her on felony charges of abuse of a corpse.
Indisputable medical facts and harrowing personal experiences are being ignored in pursuit of an authoritarian-esque political agenda, where personal autonomy and privacy are specifically stripped away from people who identify as women or have the ability to become pregnant. And what’s more, women are being penalized for seeking out care.
As a college student residing in California, it’s easy to get complacent. California residents are guaranteed the right to receive access to reproductive and abortion care. However, we can’t ignore the blatant fact that women and people who can get pregnant are facing systemic barriers to receiving abortion care. Even in California, these institutionalized roadblocks to reproductive access still exist. As of October 1st, the California Attorney General announced that the State of California is suing Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital after it refused to provide care to a patient whose water broke at 15 weeks into her pregnancy, rendering the twin fetuses viable and potentially endangering the mother’s life. While barriers largely exist in Red states that tend to vote conservative, women around the country who need the right to choose are left with little to no options. These barriers aren’t just problematic; they’re lethal. People are dying. People with families, with futures. And it will continue as long as these systemic roadblocks remain in place.
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