Abortion bans complicate access to drugs for cancer, arthritis, even ulcers

[Nevilledog]

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Laurence Tribe
@tribelaw
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“There are no reliable estimates of how many women like Hubbard may have had their treatment regimens affected under the spate of new abortion bans.” Even if unintended, these cruel and crazy consequences must be laid at the feet of the Alito Five in Dobbs

washingtonpost.com
Abortion bans complicate access to drugs for cancer, arthritis, even ulcers
Some chronically ill women face questions about critical medications that could be used to end a pregnancy.
9:46 AM · Aug 8, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/08/abortion-bans-methotrexate-mifepristone-rheumatoid-arthritis/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/bbe9Z


Becky Hubbard, 46, has decided to get sterilized so that she can go back on the only medication that has relieved her disabling pain from rheumatoid arthritis for the last eight years.

Soon after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the Tennessee woman said she got an ultimatum from her rheumatologist. If she wanted to stay on the treatment of choice for her condition, a drug called methotrexate, she was told she had to go on birth control despite her age and history of infertility.

“It is frustrating as hell,” said Hubbard, a former nurse who lives in Johnson City, Tenn., now waiting to see her gynecologist.

The sudden imposition of antiabortion laws after Roe’s reversal has left patients, doctors and pharmacists wading through a minefield of treatment issues and legal and ethical dilemmas related to women’s health care — even in situations like Hubbard’s that have nothing to do with pregnancy.

Medicines that treat conditions from cancer to autoimmune diseases to ulcers can also end a pregnancy or cause birth defects. As a result, doctors and pharmacists in more than a dozen states with strict abortion restrictions must suddenly navigate whether and when to order such drugs because they could be held criminally liable and lose their licenses for prescribing some of them to pregnant women.

*snip*

[Mad_Machine76]

1. They just asked themselves if they *could* overturn Roe (and realized they could)

not whether or not they *should* or what the consequences might be. Not a care in the world about those.

[MiniMe]

2. Things like this make me glad or relieved that I had a hysterectomy

There is zero chance of me getting pregnant. So I don't have to worry about a drugs side effects like an abortifacient any more than a man would. It sucks that many women don't have that freedom.

[slightlv]

11. I did a jump off and into the comments

in an article. One daughter writes of her mother, that her moms doctor has to call each time her mom's prescription comes up for methotrexate. CVS refuses to fill it because the mother is 56 years old. The doc has to call each time and tell CVS the mother has had a hysterectomy and no longer has the "plumbing" to HAVE a baby!

You'd think CVS would have that annotated so as not to have to make the woman go through that each and every time, but then I have the same issue every three months with CVS and my pain meds for my autoimmune disease. They're narcotics, so I've been dealing with this since the great overdose hysteria hit all of us chronic pain sufferers.

Oh... and if you couldn't tell; I detest CVS, at least, since they were bought out by Aetna Insurance, anyway. They once may have been okay as a pharmacy. But once they were taken over by Aetna, I wouldn't give you two cents for them. I get about half of my scripts from WalMart with GoodRX because they're cheaper and less hassle for those scripts.

[MiniMe]

13. I've been through that great thing about not being able to get opioids for pain

I had a quadruple bypass, and they wouldn't give me anything other than Tylenol for pain. Assholes, you just cut my chest open and broke the breast bone, it hurts! give me something for the pain. I couldn't even take advil because of the blood thinners they had me on, so no opioids and no NSAIDS. Ugh. If I was going to get addicted to opioids, I would have been addicted long ago when they used to hand them out like candy and to just tell them if you had pain. Now you can't get pain killers for any reason.

[slightlv]

15. I'm on Effexor for an AntiDepressant

You don't even want to know how long it'll take me to titer down to come off of THIS drug. But they worry about me an hydrocodone? HA! I'm lucky to get two week's supply to last a month, if I take them the way it's prescribed. Goddess help me if I have a flare. Nobody cares about us. We get left behind completely. On top of that, I'm now 67 so I know I'm now described as just a "cranky old lady" (gryn)

[Irish_Dem]

3. Only women will be affected. Men can have any drugs they want.

[SheltieLover]

4. What a surprise

[Irish_Dem]

5. I know, a real shocker, isn't it?

Actually not at all surprising to older women.

We know what life was like for ourselves, mothers and grandmothers.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

8. Speaking philosophically, what if this eventually leads to men also being denied these drugs

on the basis of the possibility they could be transferred to a woman for abortion purposes?

Good thing, or bad thing?

I hope you won't give me the obvious answers:
1) that'll never, ever happen so why even ponder it?, or
2) it shouldn't be limited for EITHER sex

because those are the really easy ones.

We are where we are in this thanks to the PuQ's on SCOTUS, so ... given these conditions ... would you feel better if the medicine was being denied to men as well (if it's going to be denied to women)?

Almost seems like you would, but I don't want to put the proverbial words in your mouth (so to speak).

[Irish_Dem]

10. Men are rarely denied anything. They even get to have as many phallic looking guns as they want.

Men are allowed to mass murder as many children as strikes their fancy.

Anything that comes out of their real penis or their fake penis is sacred.

If men were the ones who got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament and available in every bar.

Ok, sure I will play along with your question.

Yes of course you have given the right answer to the question.

YES. Men MUST be under the same draconian rule as women for equity.

Total reproductive control.

Of course it will never happen.

This has nothing to do with abortion, but the subjugation of women. If the GOP really valued the lives of children, it would prevent young males from having guns.

In all fairness to the good guys out there, they have no idea what they are talking about.
They simply cannot fathom what older women are reporting. These men have no idea what it was like for women back in the day. In part because all of these secrets were kept hidden from boys.
The girls heard the women talking. Or experienced it firsthand.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

16. Total Reproductive Control? Okay ...

So my next philosophical question is ... should the sperm-contributor have ANY 'rights'?

Or is the subject of 'carrying a fetus to delivery' rightly always a 100% female-dictated decision?

If he DOESN'T want her to do so ... fuck him, he should've thought of that before? She owns his genetic material ... because he deposited it?

What if the condom broke? Or she forgot her pill? Or whatever might've happened?

The only proper situation is that the sperm contributor involved has 0% reproductive control, no autonomy whatsoever?

[SheltieLover]

9. Yup!

I wonder how long it will be before they go after women's voting rights?

[slightlv]

12. The question I want answered, and have wanted answered

for a LONG time is WHY are women the ones suffering from autoimmune diseases and not men? And WHY has this not been more researched? (Hint: Because obviously, it's a "woman's" disease!)

It seems obvious to me it's linked in someway to our hormones, except that for some of these autoimmune diseases it seems they happen later in life, or they happen after certain events happen. Of course, correlation does not equal causation and that muddies the water. For example, they found that women having hip replacement surgery were often diagnosed with lupus or fibromyalgia within 3 months of the surgery. That's what happened to me. I was diagnosed with both within 3 months of my hip replacement.

But, talk about muddying the waters... the hip replacement and diagnoses were a couple of decades AFTER I'd had a hysterectomy. Now, I'd only had a partial hysterectomy, and I'd been on HRT for a long while, so I guess I could have had some hormones running around in there, but I'd lay odds they were few and far between. No hot flashes, no night sweats, etc. etc.

So far, these researchers seem pretty convinced we carry a gene that gets "turned on" due to some environmental event. Where is it located? What type of event turns it on? Could we have all been placed at this disadvantage beginning in the 1950's and '60's with the advent of the intense pollution we all were subjected to at that time?

I'm not a chemist or a biologist. If this stuff had hit me when I was younger, I'd probably have gone into those fields instead of into psychology. I'd probably made a better living - cause I ended up making a career in computers! (LOL) Now that I'm older with fewer brain cells, the fields are far beyond me. But damn, they're not beyond my interest. Especially not as I see so many of my friends daughters and granddaughters fall to the diseases.

[Demovictory9]

14. Exactly!!!

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. Absolutely horrifying and disgusting situation ... F*** the Alito Five (nt)

[EnergizedLib]

7. They didn't think this through well, did they?

We mustn’t stop until Roe is restored, even if under a different name.