'Am I a Felon?' The Fall of Roe v. Wade Has Permanently Changed the Doctor-Patient Relationship
A few days after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in June, Dr. Mae Winchester got a call late at night. One of her patients had developed sepsis after her water broke at 19 weeks of pregnancy. Sepsis can be fatal, and normally Winchester, a maternal-fetal medicine physician in Ohio, would rush her patient into the operating room and provide an abortion. But this time, she felt she had to call her hospital’s lawyers first.
The lawyers agreed that treating this patient with an abortion would be legal under Ohio’s new abortion ban, which contained an exception to prevent the death of the mother. But in other cases, Winchester says care has been delayed, or the lawyers have disagreed with her, and she hasn’t been allowed to provide the care she deems necessary. “Meanwhile, the patient is just sitting in the operating room by herself,” Winchester says, “not knowing what I can do.”
Winchester is just one of many doctors throughout the country struggling to navigate the complicated and rapidly shifting legal landscape of abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. With abortion rights now left up to the states, physicians and other medical providers are confused about what services they are legally allowed to provide, often forced to consult lawyers on decisions they used to be able to make on their own, and scared for their patients’ lives.
In Wisconsin, where a ban dating back to 1849 prohibits all abortions except to save the life of the pregnant patient, groups of lawyers and doctors are collectively trying to come up with guidance on what situations pose a serious enough threat to a patient’s health to justify an abortion. In Texas, some hospitals have created committees to review such situations, while others have established protocols requiring multiple doctors to sign off on medically necessary abortions. With a state law allowing private-citizen lawsuits in effect, physicians are concerned that anyone—from a local politician to a patient’s family member to a nurse or cleaning staff member—could file suit if the person disagrees with their decision. And in Idaho, the state’s total abortion ban has led doctors to discuss medically transporting patients out of state if they need serious treatment and drastically affected care for even ectopic pregnancies, a condition in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, making the pregnancy nonviable and potentially life-threatening if untreated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/am-felon-fall-roe-v-110027537.html
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