Tag: abortion bans
'Collateral Damage': Texas Abortion Ban Is Killing Pregnant Women

'Collateral Damage': Texas Abortion Ban Is Killing Pregnant Women

“It’s like a knife straight to your stomach,” Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston-based OB-GYN at an academic hospital, told Courier Texas about a third woman dying in the state during a miscarriage.

“It’s just like, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to do something to stop this. Pregnancy is high-risk enough without putting all these complications on top of it.”

The “complications” that Ivey is warning Texas women about are the state’s two abortion bans, which outlaw abortions in Texas from the moment of conception.

The laws impose such harsh penalties on doctors that they are “terrified that they’re going to be criminalized,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas-based OB-GYN.

And why wouldn’t they be terrified when they face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion that’s considered illegal? They’ll also be stripped of their medical licence, have to pay a $100,000 fine, and can also be sued civilly by anyone who wants to claim a bounty of $10,000 if they can prove a doctor provided an abortion.

“It’s hardly surprising that pregnant women have become the ‘collateral damage’ of Republican lawmakers’ mission to outlaw abortion no matter what the circumstances,” said Austin Kaplan, the Austin-based civil rights attorney who represented Texas mom Kate Cox.

Cox, 31, and a mom of two, unsuccessfully petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to allow her to get a legal abortion after she learned that her baby had a fatal anomaly and that continuing the pregnancy would endanger her future fertility and possibly her life.

Now, it’s been documented by ProPublica that since the first ban, known as Senate Bill 8, which went into effect on September 1, 2021, three young, healthy women pregnant with wanted babies have died in the state from miscarriage complications.

Nevaeh Crain, just 18, lost her life following a sepsis infection during a miscarriage less than 24 hours after her first visit to a hospital ER in Southeast Texas.

Just a day earlier, she was opening gifts at her baby shower and thrilled to be six months pregnant with a baby daughter that she planned to name Lillian.

But after she started vomiting and running a fever, she was sent home from two hospitals with a mistaken diagnosis before finally being admitted after a futile third visit on October 29, 2023.

Her mother was forced to desperately scream for someone to “do something” at the hospital to save her dying daughter’s life, but it was too late.

Josseli Barnica, a 28-year-old mom of a one-year-old daughter died of sepsis in a Houston hospital after doctors delayed what used to be standard miscarriage treatment for 40 hours, while she lay with her uterus open and exposed to bacteria.

Only when her 17-week fetus no longer had a heartbeat did doctors finally intervene to help complete her miscarriage. By then, it was too late and Barnica died of sepsis.

Porsha Negumezi, 35 and a mother of two sons, passed away during a miscarriage in a Houston hospital only 10 hours after arriving, hemorrhaging blood clots the size of grapefruits.

She bled so heavily that she required two transfusions and began experiencing chest pain. A coroner later ruled that she died of hemorrhage.

Courier Texas interviewed five doctors who provide reproductive healthcare in Texas about why they believe Negumezi, Crain and Barnica, all healthy young women, died and asked them for advice about how other pregnant Texans can do their best to survive a miscarriage in the state.

Doctors: Three miscarrying women in Texas died unnecessarily

The deaths of the women were tragically “unnecessary” according to Dennard.

“It feels like we’re in the ‘olden days,’” added Austin-based OB-GYN Dr. Nicole Moretti. “It’s a bizarre contrast … to know what you need to do in a scenario … knowing you can provide that treatment, you can physically perform the management that someone needs but then simultaneously feel like you are limited or could face repercussions. It’s maddening. It’s ludicrous.”

While none of the doctors interviewed had treated any of the women, nor had access to their medical records, they all have years of experience caring for women experiencing pregnancy complications in Texas.

And all agreed with Dennard that none of these women should have died or would have died before Texas lawmakers banned abortion.

“Women are literally losing their lives because management (of their care) is being delayed because of these bans,” added Dr. Emily Briggs, a family physician who provides obstetric care in Central Texas.

Moretti called it “crazy” that doctors are “delaying treatment to speak to a medical legal team” to find out if and when they can proceed with life saving treatment.

Texas’ abortion law bans abortions except if a woman has a life-threatening condition and is at risk of death or of “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

A Texas physician must also try to save the life of the fetus unless this would increase the risk of the patient’s death or impairment.

“If for whatever reason (a woman’s) body has decided that it’s time to push this pregnancy out… and there is still a heartbeat, we cannot as physicians in Texas move forward with assisting the mom with helping her uterus clamp down and cut off those blood vessels, so (instead) she keeps bleeding and bleeding and bleeding,” Briggs explained.

“A miscarriage is unintended,” Dennard pointed out. “The Texas legislature … because they don’t know anything about medicine, it didn’t realize that women have miscarriages and sometimes you need to do a D&C (dilation and curettage) procedure which I guess is being conflated with abortion.”

Even if miscarrying women in Texas don’t have a fetus with a heartbeat, there is “still a lot of confusion around this,” Ivey added.

“I don’t think our standard (of treating miscarriages) has changed. But how they’ve been handled has changed because of our restrictive abortion laws,” Ivey said. “There is a climate of fear in our state among physicians, among hospitals, among other health care providers.”

Specifically, according to all the doctors, there is now a reluctance among Texas doctors to provide a heavily bleeding and miscarrying woman with a dilation and curettage or dilation and evacuation, which are both used effectively to empty a miscarrying woman’s uterus of all the pregnancy remains. However, they do end a pregnancy, just as an abortion does.

“These aren’t even new cutting edge procedures, but they are lifesaving,” said Morretti, who pointed out that these procedures have been used as standard care in Texas and around the world for decades in order to help women complete difficult miscarriages.

Yet Negumezi, Crain and Barnica never received either procedure. Instead they suffered painful cramping, and in some cases ran fevers and bled out as their uteruses unsuccessfully tried to push their fetuses, which had no chance of survival, out of their bodies.

Negumezi was in dire need of a D&C to stop her life threatening blood loss, according to Dr. Nancy Binford, an Austin-based OB-GYN.

Gasping for breath, calling out for help

When the OB-GYN finally examined Negumezi seven hours after she arrived at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, he prescribed the drug misoprostol, which can be used to help complete miscarriages in certain circumstances.

But that could have made her condition worse, according to Binford.

“It would have made her uterus just do more of the contracting,” she said.

Binford said that because Negumezi was hemorrhaging and medical providers had already transfused her twice, she qualified as a “rush back” to the operating room.

“I’ve done a 100 rush backs in my 24 years (of practice) for an urgent issue like this to have a D&C,” she said.

But that’s not what happened to Negumezi, and even when she began having chest pains, no more tests were ordered. She began gasping for breath a couple of hours later and died as her husband frantically called out to hospital staff for help

“What happens when they’re bleeding out at a certain point, they’ve lost too much blood to support their cardiac activity,” Dennard concurred. “You lose so much blood your body is no longer able to create the clotting factors that are needed to support the blood that you have circulating in your body.”

The circumstances of the deaths of these three women have to be a warning to pregnant Texas women and their loved ones.

Young women who are having complications miscarrying can appear healthy before getting “sick very quickly,” Ivey explained.

How women can protect themselves

“If you are experiencing serious symptoms while miscarrying, you have to move very quickly to prevent (your) organs from failing,” Ivey said.

And while only three Texas women have been documented to have died from miscarriages since the state’s abortion ban has been in place, the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy or labor complications soared 56 percent from 2019 to 2022, according to a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

Kaplan said he advises pregnant mothers in Texas to pack a “to go bag” so that “if you need to get out of this state to get the care you need, you’ll be ready to go. Always be thinking — if something were to go wrong, where am I headed outside of Texas.”

But what can a pregnant woman who can’t quickly leave Texas do if local hospitals or urgent care centers don’t appear to be taking the risk to their lives seriously?

“Go to the biggest city near you and go to the downtown-ist hospital and don’t care what it looks like,” Binford said. ”They have the most volumes of deliveries and with volume come pregnancy complications and that means experience in handling them.”

Binford also advised that hospitals affiliated with medical schools will have established ethics committees that will include a lawyer and that committee members will be reachable quickly if a doctor is unsure about whether they can go ahead with a procedure to remove a fetus from a woman’s body.

Texas health lawyer Leah Stewart, who advises doctors and hospitals about the abortion laws, agreed that if a woman thinks she is having a severe miscarriage or another dangerous complication like an ectopic pregnancy or if her water breaks long before viability, then she should go to a large urban hospital.

They see “every single thing that goes wrong … and are better equipped to connect the right provider and give the woman standard care.”

And if you aren’t getting the attention you need quickly, she added, “You have to keep ramping up your fit throwing.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Dallas-area father whose wife nearly died when she miscarried with what would have been their second child at 13 weeks pregnant.

After multiple visits to medical centers over three days and three rounds of treatment with misoprostol, Hamilton’s wife passed out unconscious on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

She only survived because Hamilton raced her to a hospital ER for treatment.

“”Women are dying… under the circumstances we went through.. If I wouldn’t have been home to find my wife, she would have been one of those women… I could have lost her….it’s like, ‘oh my God, I really could have.’ That’s reality and that’s hard,” Hamilton added.

Bonnie Fuller is the former CEO and editor-in-chief of HollywoodLife.com & former editor-in-chief of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and USWeekly. She is now writing about reproductive freedom and politics.

Reprinted with permission from Courier Texas

Two Georgia Moms Were The First Women Killed By Abortion Bans

Two Georgia Moms Were The First Women Killed By Abortion Bans

Amber Thurman was a beautiful 28 year-old single mom in Atlanta with a beaming smile and an adorable six year -old son. She was a medical assistant with big plans to become a nurse.

But on August 20, 2022 she was dead, her uterus ravaged by a sepsis infection from an incomplete abortion. For 20 hours doctors at an Atlanta hospital delayed providing her with a life-saving dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure. By the time surgeons got her into the operating room, they were racing to try to save her life.

Just two weeks before that, Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp had. signed the state’s new “Heartbeat” abortion ban into law and announced that he was “overjoyed” that the ban would keep Georgia women “safe” and “healthy.”

Abortions could no longer be practiced in the state after a fetal heartbeat was detected, usually around six weeks, unless a woman was a victim of rape or incest or at risk of dying. The criminal penalty for medical providers who didn’t adhere to the strict guidelines was up to 10 years in prison and the revocation of their medical licenses.

The result for for Amber who arrived by ambulance after vomiting up blood and passing out at home, was that she didn’t didn’t quickly receive what had just recently been a routine D & C to clear her uterus. Her case was now a frightening hot potato for the doctors at the hospital.

Was she close enough to death to meet the new law’s requirement when her white blood count and her blood pressure fell dangerously low? How about when antibiotics weren’t enough to curb her “acute sepsis’ infection? Or when she became at risk for bleeding out? Or when her vital organs began to fail?

When was she close enough to death to qualify for a legal abortion under Georgia’s ban?

By the time the hospital physicians believed they were meeting the new law’s standard, Amber died on the operating table.

This loving young mother tragically became the first known American woman to die from a Trump abortion ban less than two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022 by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

It only took two months.

However, her “preventable” death has just now became public more than two years later, when the ProPublica news outlet published the news after they obtained a report from the official Georgia state committee which investigates maternal deaths.

The committee which reports to the state’s Department of Health conducted a two year examination of the circumstances of Amber’s death which followed a rare complication from her two-pill abortion medication regime.

She received the pills when she drove to a North Carolina clinic four hours away, where abortion was still legal. Only 32 deaths have been linked to medication abortion pills between 2000 and 2022 and almost 6,000,000 American women have used them. They are considered safer than Viagra.

Unfortunately in Amber’s case, the pills failed to expel all the fetal contents from her uterus. It’s because the young woman didn’t receive the known standard of care -- the D & C -- quickly for her dire condition that the committee ruled that her death was “preventable.”

Now make no mistake -- this is what America’s women and those who love them must accept. Abortions bans cause young, healthy women to die. Death is now a risk for ANY pregnancy in the 22 states that have enacted the Trump bans.

And if the former president is re-elected on November 5, death will be a chance that every woman of reproductive age will take in America every time she decides to get pregnant or accidentally becomes pregnant.

That’s because Donald Trump -- no matter how many times he tries to confuse you about his stance on abortion -- WILL end it nationally, just as his Christian nationalist and evangelical followers have demanded.

You must have noticed how Trump is proudly crowing that HE’s The One who was able to “kill Roe V Wade” after 50 years. HE’s the one who appointed the three ultra right ring judges that he knew would do it. He promised to do it and he did!

If Trump and ‘pro life’ zealot JD Vance are elected, abortion in America is over.

If the pair can do it legislatively they will. If not, they’ll follow their Project 2025 handbook and ‘backdoor’ their ban. Their compliant Justice Department will enforce the 1873 Comstock Act, preventing the transportation of any abortion medications or surgical equipment across state lines.

Then on top of that, Trump’s obedient appointed FDA chief will withdraw the abortions pills as well as several forms of popular birth control from the market.

Done.

Women like Amber and Texans Amanda Zurawski, Kate Cox, Dr. Austin Dennard, and Madysyn Anderson, Tennessean Allie Phillips and Floridian Anya Cook and millions of women in the 22 Trump abortion ban states already know what it’s like to have no right to make decisions about their bodies.

They’ve been forced to flee to other states for abortions of unviable babies to save their own lives. They’ve lost their fertility after sepsis ravaged their reproductive organs when their water broke at 18 weeks. They’ve been left to bleed out in public restrooms after miscarriages until they were close enough to death for doctors to legally treat them .

Meanwhile in Amber’s state of Georgia, OBGYNs are practicing “under an element of fear," as Dr. Didi Saint Louis, an Atlanta OBGYN, confirms to me. “You don’t know what situation you might encounter that could land you in jail or cause you to lose your medical license.”

“I shouldn’t have to be fearing that I will go to jail when I’m treating patients. I can see why women would be afraid to seek care and to be honest about their situations so we can treat them as effectively as possible,” says the doctor, who has been practicing for more than 20 years. “Some women don’t know what the law is. It’s confusing.”

She stresses that since Georgia’s abortion ban was enacted, doctors feel like “we have our hands tied behind our backs.” And while she doesn’t understand why the hospital and doctor who treated Amber delayed urgent care for so long, she explains that after the law was enacted “we were uncertain and confused about how to interpret the law and how we could provide care.”

“We were scrambling to understand it.”

She says the abortion ban adds delays to the care of patients with complications, miscarriages, incomplete abortions, and other conditions which require consultations with hospital leadership, risk managers, and lawyers before proceeding.

“Sometimes it makes it difficult to practice medicine.” in Georgia admits the doctor who is a member of the Committee to Protect Health Care’s National Reproductive Freedom Task Force.

And sometimes she has to tell pregnant patients with serious health risks that they may have to leave the state to get an abortion.’

An Atlanta mom of three, 41, Candi Miller, didn’t leave the state when she accidentally got pregnant again. She suffered from debilitating lupus, diabetes and hypertension. To save her life, she ordered abortion pills online, but like Amber she tragically didn’t expel all he fetal tissue from her uterus.

When the excruciating pain set in from an infection she was too terrified by the state’s new abortion ban to see a doctor. She suffered for days taking strong painkillers until on November 12, her husband found her dead in her bed, next to her three year-old daughter.

An autopsy ruled that her death was caused by the combination of painkillers she consumed as she suffered.

Her son told ProPublica that the family believes she could have gotten “jail time “ if she was caught “trying to do anything to get rid of the baby.”

JD Vance just told a rally that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wadewas a “victory” and that “the Republican Party is proud to be the ‘pro life’ and ‘pro family’ party."

Tell that to Amber and Candi’s children who lost their mothers.

When it takes two years to investigate the deaths of pregnant women, we should be prepared -- how many American women have already died?

Donald Trump asked his followers at a Long Island, New York rally on September 18, “What the hell do you have to lose?” if you vote for him.

If you’re a woman of reproductive age, the answer is clear: It could be your life.

Bonnie Fuller is a contributing writer to Courier Newsroom, Ms. magazine. and The Free Press covering politics and reproductive freedom. She is the former CEO of HollywoodLife.com and former editor-in-chief of US Weekly, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and YM magazines. This is reprinted with permission from Your Body, Your Choice, her free Substack newsletter.

Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.

Nancy Mace

'We're Going To Lose Huge': Mace Warns Of GOP Wipeout Over Abortion (VIDEO)

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) warns that the GOP risks facing a wipeout at the polls in 2024 if her colleagues remain focused on passing strict state-level abortion bans rather than finding a “middle ground” on the issue.

Mace, a sometime Trump critic who survived reelection last year, sounded the alarm on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court chose to keep abortion pills legal, freezing a Trump-appointed federal judge’s ruling that restricted the drug.

Taking aim at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new six-week abortion ban legislation and a Republican bill in the South Carolina legislature that proposes “punishment by death” for women who undergo abortions, Mace said the GOP was sending "the wrong message heading into '24."

The Republican insisted that the anti-abortion extremists within her party were out of touch with their constituents, a majority she contended didn’t want abortion severely restricted or outlawed.

"We're going to lose huge if we continue down this path of extremities and finding that middle ground. The vast majority of people want some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle," Mace told ABC anchor Martha Raddatz.

"They want exceptions for rape and incest — they want women to have access to birth control,” she added.

Indeed, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National poll, released Monday, found that two-thirds of Americans (64 percent), including a majority of Republicans, opposed banning medication abortion — that is, the use of a prescription pill to end a pregnancy.

A CBS News/YouGov poll released over a week before found that 69 percent of Americans who support abortion wanted the Biden Administration to ignore court rulings seeking to end widespread access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

Americans’ broad support for abortion after the Dobbs decision has remained the same since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade last June, with a Pew Research Center poll showing that support rose from 61 percent in March 2022 (before the ruling) to 62 percent in July (after the ruling).

Mace’s comments offered a window into the divide within the GOP over abortion bans, an issue Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, recognize was central to the party’s historic underperformance in the 2022 midterms.

TheWashington Postreported last Thursday that Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, urged her party’s candidates in private to “address abortion” before it damaged them politically.

“You have to address it, not avoid it,” McDaniel reportedly said. “And then you can talk about other things.”

Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway implored Republican donors and candidates to infuse “compassion” into their discussions on abortion and emphasize the need for exceptions in abortion legislation.

During her ABC interview, Mace suggested that anywhere but the fringe of anti-abortion extremism were “commonsense positions that we can take and still be pro-life.”

"I saw what happened after Roe v. Wade because I represent a very purple district, as purple as this dress, and I saw the sentiment change dramatically," Mace said. "And as Republicans, we need to read the room on this issue."

Mace also argued that dancing around or wholly ignoring the issue of abortion wasn’t a position Republicans should take, considering the widespread support for abortion among voters.

"We've buried our heads in the sand. We're afraid to talk about it. Because we're afraid, we want to go to the extreme corners of this issue. But that's not where the vast majority of Americans are right now. And we've got to show compassion, especially to victims who've been raped," said Mace, who has often shared her experience of being sexually assaulted at 16.

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