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The repeal of abortion in the United States leaves doctors in legal limbo

2022-08-07T10:44:50.293Z


The regulations in the most restrictive States provide prison sentences for doctors, who must consult their lawyers before intervening in spontaneous abortions


On June 29, five days after the US Supreme Court struck down federal protection of abortion rights, Emily Diament, pregnant with her second daughter, was due for her 20th week review.

Everything was going well in a pregnancy that "could not be more desired."

She will always remember it: it was Wednesday, at two in the afternoon, when the doctor told them that the fetus's heart had stopped beating.

"It was terrible.

At that time, Ram [her husband] and I had to think: Where does the Supreme Court ruling leave us now?

"Everything was new," she adds in an email, this 33-year-old public relations: "a panorama full of unknowns and fears."

The gynecologist explained the alternatives.

The first, "induction," was the least certain;

It basically consists of giving birth to the stillborn baby.

The second, more reliable and less onerous for her, was to undergo a D&E operation, an acronym for “dilation and evacuation”.

"The process is also faster," says Diament.

The couple opted for the latter.

They both live in New Orleans, “the best city in the world”, as she likes to define it.

The Supreme Court ruling, which overturned the half-century precedent set in 1973 by the

Roe v. Wade ruling,

it returned to the States the capacity to regulate women's reproductive health (the first to approve a specific norm was, this Friday, Indiana).

Legislators from Diament, Louisiana, anxiously awaited that moment with a “trigger law”, ready to go into effect since 2006. Three days after the ruling, a judge blocked the activation of that rule, one of the most restrictive in the country.

It was just a mirage: on July 8 abortion was outlawed in Louisiana even for rape and incest.

And so it goes: after several comings and goings in the courts, the ban resists, pending new legal battles.

Among the restrictions contemplated by the law is the veto on D&E unless the mother's life is in danger or the baby has already died.

Diament's case fell under the permitted assumptions, but her misfortune convinced her that she should tell her story.

"After going through that process and talking to several doctors about her concerns," she explains, "I knew this happened to me at this exact time for a reason."

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Bhavik Kumar is one of those dismayed doctors who have been pushed into legal limbo by the new rules.

He consults at a clinic of the largest provider of abortions in the United States, Planned Parenthood, in Houston, Texas, another epicenter of the restrictive tsunami that hits the United States.

He explains that an "induction" can last "from one to 12 or 24 hours", carries more risks ("the same as childbirth") and generates more hospital expenses, in a country where these can lead to the ruin of patients with less money.

Some, however, prefer it, because "the baby comes out intact, and they can bond with it," adds Kumar.

With D&E, which uses forceps, mothers don't see the lifeless body.

Conversation between doctor and patient

And that is all that Kumar asks: that the matter be resolved in a conversation between doctor and patient, "without political interference."

“Since the law came into force [in Texas], the only cases in which we are allowed to intervene after six weeks is if the life of the person is in danger, or if there is no doubt that the pregnancy is not viable. ”, he warns.

More information

The war against abortion in the US is being waged state by state

Kumar, like many of his colleagues, has doubts about the idea of ​​“life in danger”.

"It's not exactly a scientific concept," he clarifies.

“Every doctor, every ER, every clinic or every hospital may have their own theory of what that means.

Now, instead of looking at the data and talking to patients to decide what's best, doctors, hospitals and clinics have to consult with lawyers, ethics committees or administrators about what they can and can't do.

Meanwhile, they also remain in limbo.

The precautions seem justified: both Texas and Louisiana threaten with prison sentences of between 10 and 15 years to those who perform abortions outside the supposedly permitted ones.

Protests in Indianapolis, before the promulgation of a restrictive law in the State of Indiana, last Friday. CHENEY ORR (REUTERS)

A gynecologist thus defined the new dilemmas of her practice during an interview with EL PAÍS held at a reproductive health center in Des Moines (Iowa): "It's terrible," lamented the doctor, who asked to speak anonymously.

"They make us choose between the Hippocratic Oath [and the famous "do no harm"] and the criminal code."

This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to take matters into his own hands with a Justice Department lawsuit challenging a new Idaho law that, when it takes effect at the end of the month, will allow prosecutors to "indict, arrest and prosecute a doctor merely by showing that an abortion has been performed, regardless of the circumstances.”

The rule thus endorses the burden of proof on doctors (that is, to prove whether the woman's life was in danger or not, for example, or if there was incest or rape, in cases where the law contemplates those exceptions) .

According to Garland, who warned that it would be the first in a series of legal actions by the Biden Administration to mitigate the effects of the new state laws, that provision conflicts with a federal standard,

More information

Indiana becomes the first state to pass an anti-abortion law after the US Supreme Court ruling

“D&E requires training that many doctors lack,” explains Diament.

“With the new laws, it is likely that there will be doctors who prefer not to learn the technique to avoid its possible consequences.

It's not that we don't have autonomy over our bodies, it's that doctors can't watch over our health either.

This is not protecting life, quite the contrary.

It's completely surreal."

“We must not forget that we are facing cases in which pregnancies are absolutely desired.

First they have to accept terrible news, and then they make them go through a process that for many is very traumatic, and that after a few weeks they have to relive when the hospital bill arrives”, argues Gabriela Benazar Acosta, spokesperson from New York. from Planned Parenthood Latino.

Kumar warns, for his part, that "medicine is a science with vast gray areas, no matter how hard these legislators insist on the contrary."

"No one better than doctors, in an empathetic dialogue with patients and their families, can know in each specific case what is the best way to act."

These days, stories like Diament's are emerging in the United States ("there have always been," says Kumar, "but now the spotlight is on them").

Stories of women who are sent home by hospitals with instructions to return when they get worse and are bleeding "really" ("And that, even when it is clear that there is no turning back," warns the doctor).

Or a patient in Texas whose water broke at week 18 and was suggested to stay in the hospital until week 24 to keep her pregnant until then, which is when “viability” outside the womb is set to begin.

Maybe then, the baby might survive (the options, Alan Peaceman, a professor of maternal-fetal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, told NPR

"All this means that some have to travel to other states because they do not want to wait to get even more sick," adds Kumar.

Since the Supreme took down

Roe

, class and race are two factors that hover more than ever before in the debate on reproductive health in the United States.

With this regressive wave, which comes after half a century in which women took for granted a protection that is now denied them, began an exodus of patients from their places of origin to States in which they do perform an abortion, which it has created a gap, another gap, between those who can afford to take vacation days, often unpaid, from their jobs and pay for the trip and the intervention, and those who simply cannot afford it.

In the case of spontaneous abortions, inevitable in between 10% and 20% of pregnancies, this different position in the wheel of social fortune can become, if things get complicated, deadly.

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Source: elparis

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