Abortion, Dobbs, and Health Care

Here is an account from Texas explaining that obstetricians, gynecologists, and obstetric nurses are now either leaving or planning on leaving the state and, in some cases, the profession. They don’t want to be required to harm patients. They don’t want to watch patients get sicker and sicker until, finally, a life-saving abortion can be carried out. Some facilities are shutting down their obstetrics units. Others are unable to care for people with serious complications of pregnancy – obstetricians don’t want to work in rural Texas and don’t want to face the risks of practice in a state where they are likely to be subject to terrorist attacks, even if they follow Texas’s draconian laws. Here we have a report of an Idaho hospital planning to stop delivering babies, because they cannot hire obstetricians.

In anti-abortion states, and sometimes in pro-choice states where “Christian” hospital systems are involved, medical personnel are now expected to watch patients sicken and die because of arbitrary misogynistic laws and rules. In some cases, they are expected to lie to patients as well. In a well-known case in Bellingham Washington, a pro-choice state, a woman nearly died miscarrying because the physicians at the Roman Catholic PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham were unwilling to perform an abortion until she was in agony – didn’t even inform her she was at risk.

In states where abortion is outlawed, the health care system becomes, when a patient needs an abortion, a system of brutal control and punishment. This cannot fail to corrupt all participants in the system. What kind of people stand by and watch a woman suffer, possibly die, when they know they could prevent it? And yet this was the norm for a century before Roe. A generation of practitioners will be corrupted and go on to work in other states.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall --but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other." – Lincoln