The Boston Globe has an article about how the Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on so-called “partial birth” abortion is impacting doctors. Since the ban has gone into effect, doctors have had to devise ways to provide the highest and safest quality of care to their patients without breaking the law. The latest strategy is to administer a lethal injection to mid-term fetuses before performing the abortion.
That clinical shift in late-term abortions goes deeply against the grain, some doctors say: It poses a slight risk to the woman and offers her no medical benefit.
[. . .]But others, although they do not perform the banned procedure, feel compelled to do all they can to protect themselves and their staff from the possibility of being accused. Upheld in April, the federal ban is broadly written, does not specify an age for the fetus, and carries a two-year prison sentence.
In Boston, three major Harvard-affiliated hospitals — Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s, and Beth Israel Deaconess — have responded to the ban by making the injections the new standard operating procedure for abortions beginning at around 20 weeks’ gestation, said Dr. Michael F. Greene, director of obstetrics at Mass. General. [. . .]
Greene said that in the experienced hands of hospital staff, the injections add no risk and are “trivially simple,” compared with other obstetrical procedures. The main downside, he said, is that “it is yet another procedure that the patient has to endure.”
Patients have not objected to the injections, he said.
“They all are appreciative of what we do for them and understand the circumstances under which we work,” Greene said.
So what do we make of that? My first reaction is to object to any procedure that causes an additional risk to a woman while providing no benefit to her, especially when it is being done to satisfy arbitrary and murky regulations. But then I realize that what I’m really objecting to isn’t the actions of these doctors– it’s an extension of my objection to the ban being in place at all.
The fact is that doctors are caught in a cross-fire, right now. They have female patients who trust them to provide the best medical care, and they want to help. They also have the government breathing down their neck. So what are they to do? It’s really easy to sit on the sidelines and call on these doctors to act as martyrs for the cause, but I don’t think that’s the best use of anyone’s resources. These doctors are doing the absolute best that they can inside of a bad situation. Like it or not, we are already running low in abortion providers in America. And these doctors will not be able to help any women if they’re behind bars. It’s a really shitty compromise, but these doctors are not to blame for that– Bush & Co. are.
Things get even worse, though. I have written previously about the shortage of doctors who provide abortions and the dire need to train more. Unfortunately, the problem might start to get worse:
That concern [of legal accusations] is so great in [Dr. Mark Nichols'] clinic, he said, that the ban is having an impact on medical education: Medical students and nursing students are no longer invited to watch later-term abortions, for fear one might misinterpret the procedure and lodge a criminal complaint.
Abortions are performed at a wide range of facilities, from major hospitals to small, tightknit family planning clinics, and the setting can greatly influence the decision about injections, said Dr. Laurent Delli-Bovi, medical director of Women’s Health Services, a private family planning facility in Chestnut Hill.
In large hospitals, she said, there is likely to be a range of feeling for and against abortion and so more need for providers to act defensively.
Fucking hell. Is this what we can expect in regards to reproductive health care from now on? Can we honestly imagine any other specialty in which doctors would be so terrified of their own students landing them in jail that they would turn them all down flat? Can you imagine, for any other procedure, having to go to a doctor under that level of scrutiny? Forget malpractice suits– these doctors could face criminal charges for doing a procedure correctly! That’s a hell of a lot of additional stress for doctors who already face protesters everyday and receive frequent death threats simply for doing their jobs.
But hey, as the Supreme Court so clearly emphasized, it’s just women’s health that we’re talking about here.
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