On April 24, the Supreme Court will hear arguments weighing whether Idaho politicians have the power to block doctors from providing emergency medical care to patients with pregnancy complications — a case that will open the door for other states to ban reproductive care from emergencies and worsen the medical infrastructure for people at all levels. Once again, politicians have created a case that could have devastating impacts on doctors’ ability to provide – and pregnant women to receive – essential reproductive health care.
I am a family physician who has practiced medicine in rural Idaho for over 20 years, where I have had the opportunity to coach hundreds of patients through pregnancy. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my state’s healthcare system is in crisis, thanks in large part to our near-total abortion ban. Now, instead of trying to salvage what’s left, Idaho politicians are seeking to accelerate our downward spiral by making it even more difficult for doctors like me to provide care to patients in need. I can only hope that the Court takes into account that it is not just abortion that is at stake in this case – it is the future of urgent care and medicine as a whole.
Rural health care has always faced challenges, but in the nearly two years since the overthrow of the Roe v., it got exponentially worse. In Idaho we lost almost a quarter of our obstetricians since the state’s abortion ban went into effect – colleagues and friends who entered medicine to help people are being forced to stop practicing obstetrics in our state. They realized that it was impossible to provide adequate care while under the thumb of politicians more interested in advancing their extremist agenda than protecting the health of their constituents.
Idaho’s abortion ban makes it a crime for anyone to perform or assist in performing an abortion in almost all circumstances. The ban doesn’t even include an exception for when a person’s health is at risk – only for when a doctor determines that an abortion is necessary to prevent the pregnant person’s death. Ask any doctor and they will tell you that this “exception” leads to more questions than answers.
See more information: ‘Am I a criminal? The fall of Roe v. Permanently changed the doctor-patient relationship
Patients need an emergency abortion in a wide range of circumstances, including to resolve a health-threatening miscarriage. But there is no clear legal definition under the ban of what exactly this means or when we can intervene, and doctors – operating under the threat of being sued – have no choice but to err on the side of caution.
“Can I continue to replace blood loss quickly enough? How many organ systems must be failing? Can a patient be hours away from death before I intervene, or does it need to take minutes? These are the insensitive questions that doctors are now forced to think about, while our patients count on us to do the right thing and put their needs first.
As a result, pregnant patients sometimes make repeated trips to the emergency room because they are repeatedly told that nothing can be done for them until their complications become more serious. Imagine if someone you loved had a fever of 100 degrees, but was told that nothing could be done until the fever rose to 100 degrees and their organs began to fail. Requiring patients to reach the point of no return before administering care is not sound medical policy – it is blatant cruelty, and it will only get worse as long as we allow extremism, not science, to run rampant in our parliaments and overrun our system. service insurance.
It also violates a long-standing federal law — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) — that requires hospitals to treat emergencies before they become fatal. This is exactly why the U.S. Department of Justice sued Idaho shortly after the state’s abortion ban went into effect. The lawsuit argues only that Idaho should allow doctors to perform abortions in medical emergencies when that is the standard stabilizing treatment, but even that proved too much for state leaders.
Instead, Idaho politicians fought the DOJ all the way to the Supreme Court. How the Supreme Court rules will have broad implications that will reverberate across the country. If the Court finds that federal law no longer protects pregnant people during emergencies, it will give anti-abortion politicians across the country the green light to deny essential abortion care, force providers to leave states where the choices they make with their patients may be secondary. divined by prosecutors, and continue this cycle of inhumanity to patients.
As we saw in Idaho, policies driven by anti-abortion extremism make health care worse for everyone. This attack on abortion did not end with abortion – on the contrary, it extended to more of our rights and healthcare, with birth control, IVF, prescription medicationsand now emergency medical care is at risk.
This must stop.
For nearly 40 years, federal law has ensured that patients have access to the emergency care they need, including when a pregnancy goes terribly wrong. The Supreme Court must uphold this law and ensure that pregnant people continue to receive the care they need when they need it most. The health of my patients in West Central Idaho – and millions of other Americans across the country – deserves no less.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
