Hospitals May Soon Be Forced To Let Pregnant Women Die

570 days ago the Supreme Court stripped women of their inherent right to an abortion. Justice Clarence Thomas euphemistically framed that decision as a delegation of power back to the states. In reality, it was a calculated play rooted in prejudice and designed to open the floodgates. 

Now, over a year and a half later, the court is gearing up for another huge case. Only this time it isn’t women’s freedom at stake: it is their lives. 

On January 5, the Supreme Court announced it would begin hearing arguments over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Advice Labor Act (EMTALA) in April. That’s right. In just a few months a bunch of senile old men who know less about chicks than Steve Buscemi will determine whether states can ban hospitals from performing standard medical care to patients suffering life-threatening medical complications.

EMTALA was established during the Reagan Administration to emphasize the importance of public access to emergency services, regardless of ability to pay. It requires all hospitals that accept Medicare to provide stabilizing treatment to any patient with an emergency medical condition to prevent them from suffering serious injury. When Roe vs. Wade was dismantled in 2022, President Biden signed an Executive Order protecting access to reproductive health care; with that came clarifying guidance from the HHS placing medical abortions under the scope of protection. 

“Under the law, no matter where you live, women have the right to emergency care – including abortion care,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. “In no uncertain terms, we are reinforcing that we expect providers to continue offering these services and that federal law preempts state abortion bans when needed for emergency care.”

Despite this clear-cut guidance from the federal government, on August 25, 2022, legislators in Idaho criminalized abortion, making it illegal for doctors to perform unless deemed necessary to "prevent death” to the mother. The basis for their argument is that state politicians – as opposed to doctors and federal health administrators – should have the ultimate say in what constitutes a medical emergency. “The federal government cannot use EMTALA to override in the emergency room state laws about abortion any more than it can use it to override state law on organ transplants or marijuana use,” the state’s attorney general wrote in its petition to the high court. 

The ambiguous language of Idaho Code §18-622 and its divergence in nature from EMTALA forced the Justice Department to sue the state of Idaho just days later. A U.S. district court agreed with the Biden Administration’s repudiation and placed an injunction on the law, blocking it from applying to medical emergencies. Things took a turn for the worse however on January 5, when the Supreme Court issued its own opinion, reversing the lower court’s decision and reinstating the near-total abortion ban. 

I won’t pretend to be some reproductive expert but I do know one thing for certain. EMTALA is the only federal safeguard for women in need of emergency abortions. If the Supreme Court abolishes that, women will start dropping like flies. 

One already died. Yeah, you heard me. About a week ago The New Yorker did an exposé on what is suspected to be the first death stemming from failure to receive an abortion. Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 29-year-old immigrant, and the de-facto mother to her two younger brothers, died outside an emergency room in Luling, Texas, in the summer of 2022. 

She was well-known at the hospital, as she had previously been admitted into ICU multiple times for severe pregnancy complications including hypertension and pulmonary edema. Despite the obvious need for an abortion, the offer was never made and she died several hours later. The New Yorker interviewed four medical experts on the matter, all of whom came to the same conclusion: if offered and accepted, an abortion would have saved her life.”

Make no mistake, the doctors are NOT the ones to blame. In fact, many are outraged by the impossible position the state has put them in. “It’s very frustrating to have your hands tied because the patient who you need to save is not the one that’s protected by law,” complained one doctor working at the hosptial Glick was admitted into.

Other Idaho-based doctors have chosen a different route, submitting formal declarations to the Supreme Court in support of the procedures. Dr. Stacey Seyb, an OB-GYN specialist at St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center, noted that modern abortion care is the main reason why women aren’t dying from pregnancy complications as often as they used to. In his letter, he described various situations where terminating a pregnancy through abortion is the only medical treatment that can save a woman’s life. He cited three of his own patients as examples and pointed out the increasing regularity of such cases. 

Per Rolling Stone:

The first patient was a 22-year-old who was 18 weeks pregnant and arrived at his hospital with a fever, tender uterus, and an elevated heart rate; an ultrasound revealed her water had broken many days earlier. Without treatment, an abortion, Sayeb says, “the chance of her progressing to severe sepsis and dying was very high.” If she happened to survive, she was at high risk of infertility or a hysterectomy. 

There was the case of a 35-year old with a partial molar pregnancy — a condition that causes the placenta to grow irregularly. She arrived with headache, vision problems, and severely high blood pressure. “The only medically acceptable action to preserve her life was the termination of the pregnancy. Not only was the pregnancy ultimately not viable due to the nature of the molar pregnancy, but removal of the placenta — i.e., delivery — was the only cure to reverse the severe preeclampsia.”

There was the 25-year old who arrived at the hospital 19 weeks pregnant and bleeding uncontrollably from her vagina. She’d lost so much blood that she was in hypovolemic shock. “If left untreated, the risks of life-threatening shock, even with blood replacement, were very high,” Seyb said. Doctors across the state have confronted similar cases: In his work as a high-risk pregnancy consultant, Seyb described receiving a call from a physician in another part of the state, asking to transfer a patient with the same symptoms. “He was qualified but was afraid of the potential ramifications of his actions if he proceeded with termination…. This is one example that providers do not have a clear guide as to what situations will place their livelihood in danger.”

Unfortunately, women are fighting a war on multiple fronts. This isn’t one state acting brazenly out of nowhere. This is a concerted effort by far-right Republicans to erode every fiber of Roe vs. Wade from existence. Attorney generals from 20 other states filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, declaring: “It cannot be that, by directing hospitals to stabilize indigent patients, EMTALA creates an affirmative right to demand whatever procedure an individual patient or doctor might wish, without regard to state medical regulations.” 

I said it before in the first blog I ever wrote and I will say it again for the people in the back: if you as a man think you have the right to tell a woman what she can and can’t do with her body, you are a bitch ass pussy. That being said, I wrote this on MLK day so there's no better time to post this quote.

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

- Martin Luther King (and Collin Norcross)