An educator’s perspective on abortion laws in a state with a relatively liberal abortion law: a presentation at a doctor’s office
The case received a lot of attention after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion.
She said a physician in a leadership position at the hospital was disappointed that they’d had to say no to the journalist’s request to embed at their hospital. She said the doctor in the leadership position told her that ” ‘We have to stop muzzling physicians. I want to figure out a way of getting people to speak up. “
The doctor was asked to stop speaking to the NY Times at this time, but he said no and sent them along with the questions and answers.
The Texas doctor that works for a hospital can speak about abortion, but not where she works, she cannot use her computer, and she is not allowed to communicate with journalists on her work email.
As a state that has relatively liberal abortion laws, I’m assuming we would step up in a number of ways to meet the surge. I thought we would use our position as a women’s health institution to educate people about the effects of these laws on women’s health.
At a meeting of the American Medical Association, president Jack Resneck spoke about how it is difficult for doctors to practice medicine in states that ban abortion.
It is important for doctors and hospitals to be aware that what they say could potentially cause problems for clinicians and health care systems, according to the head of a group of 400 teaching hospitals.
“It’s really scary,” a doctor tells reporters about the fetus’s loss of a premature baby
The fetus was 19 weeks pregnant and too young to survive outside the womb. Her water had broken, an ultrasound showing no amniotic fluid around the baby. In states where it’s legal, doctors would give the pregnant women a shot at ending the pregnancies since they have a high chance of becoming sick and dying if they don’t.
Since the passage of the Texas laws, some women have been denied abortions even when their lives were in danger and the fetus had fatal birth defects and would die within minutes of birth. The fetus had died, but some people were denied abortions.
The doctor, who works at a public university, said that they had to watch patients decline in front of their eyes.
“This has clearly been done to make us feel like criminals. She said it made them feel like they were doing something wrong. “I think we’re all pretty scared. I’m afraid of losing my job. Losing my job would be a big deal since I am the primary source of income for my family.
The doctor told CNN that when he was at the meeting, the administrators had watched a video of the event and obtained a transcript to make sure he didn’t make a connection to his employer.
Discussion on ‘Chiral Change and the Health and Safety of Abortion’ by the Cancer Doctors at MD Anderson’s Public Relations Office
They said that they got a strong sense that they would say no. “They worry about state funding sources and what happens if it gets controversial, so unfortunately instead of supporting us, they want everyone to play nice and quiet and not stir up any trouble.”
She says that abortion providers are not just trying to keep their patients healthy, they’re also trying to keep their livelihoods intact and their personal freedom intact.
Despite these statements from respected national organizations, a university official told the residents to also remove the photo from their personal social media accounts, according to the doctor familiar with the situation. The doctor added that a little bit later, the official told the residents they could post the picture on their own accounts, as long as they didn’t identify where they work.
A month later, at a mandatory lecture, university lawyers gave the residents a presentation about the limits of free speech, according to the doctor. CNN viewed a photo of the presentation.
The doctor said that people shy away from making trouble because they can’t find a job if they’re perceived as difficult.
In the past year, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has issued more than 150 news releases detailing advances in the lab, studies conducted by its doctors, awards for its researchers and a new culinary medicine program, among dozens of other topics.
When CNN approached one of the authors, she said she was happy to speak but that inquiries should be directed to the media office.
The medical center’s director of public relations told CNN that the center is reviewing the U.S. Supreme Court opinion but will not be commenting at this time. The results speak for themselves.
They are concerned that banning abortions could hurt pregnant cancer patients. Pregnant women can’t receive certain cancer tests, and treatments that can harm a fetus, so if abortion is not an option, they sometimes have to delay lifesaving cancer care. Two breast cancer doctors wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in August that abortion bans will harm some of their patients if they can’t offer complete or safe treatment to a pregnant woman.
When CNN reached out to the cancer doctors at MD Anderson on September 9 to discuss what they have seen since Texas passed strict abortion bans last year, an unsigned response from the MD Anderson public relations office stated that the doctors were “not available for an interview.”
MD Anderson said in a statement that its providers discuss the published data on the implications of delaying treatment due to pregnancy, and they refer patients to maternal fetal medicine specialists.
On October 7, CNN pressed further to speak with the doctors, and an associate vice president said they were working on coordinating the interviews, but none was made available prior to the deadline for this story.
Wade is the chief public affairs officer at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, a membership organization that includes physicians who are experts in high-risk pregnancies. A reporter from The New York Times Magazine approached Wade with the idea of having a photographer in the high-risk maternal-fetal medicine department.
Why New Laws aren’t Important to Maternal Pedestrians, but they Are Happening to Physicists and Psychiatrists
“When people don’t hear these stories, they don’t understand the reality of what these laws are doing to real people, and I think real people are suffering. That’s what people need to understand and hear,” she said.
Hospitals and practices that chose not to accept The New York Times invitation were warning her that it would make their attorneys very nervous. It might be something.
She claims that legislators have put clinicians in a terrible place. “Clinicians should step up and learn about the laws that do and do’t prohibit and practice to the full scope that they can.”
After the Supreme Court made a decision, she and other maternal fetal medicine specialists received a call from their hospital administrators.
It became clear on the call that the medical center would don’t take a particularly activist approach and won’t make it easy for doctors to describe the impact of new laws to the public.
She said people cried when they heard about the institution making this difficult.
Why doctors should not be accused of abortion hysterotomy? Dr. Wynia tells a Colorado medical student at the University of Colorado
“That’s insane,” Dr. Matthew Wynia says. He is a doctor who works at the University of Colorado. “[A hysterotomy is] much more dangerous, much more risky – the woman may never have another pregnancy now because you’re trying to avoid being accused of having conducted an abortion.”
He says that this is a leadership issue. He was the Director for the Institute for Ethics and Center for Patient Safety at the American Medical Association. “There will be individual doctors who presumably will end up in court. And then the question will arise: Were they supported? Can they be supported?”
“I never imagined colleagues would find themselves tracking down hospital attorneys before performing urgent abortions, when minutes count, [or] asking if a 30% chance of maternal death or impending renal failure meet the criteria for the state’s exemptions, or whether they must wait a while longer until their pregnant patient gets even sicker,” he said.
At the meeting, the American Medical Association passed a resolution to set up a task force and legal strategy for physicians who provide abortions when they are medical standard of care.
She told the subcommittee in the summer that Ob-Gyns’ medical expertise and years of training made it possible for them to save a woman’s life.
In Canada, Dr. Henry Morgentaler was imprisoned for violating the abortion laws. He received death threats and his Toronto clinic was firebombed twice. The cases brought against him helped to make abortion legal in that country.
And in today’s environment, getting arrested for defying abortion laws on purpose might not actually be effective in getting laws changed, points out Dr. Louise King, director of reproductive bioethics for the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and an Ob-Gyn surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Milan Vuitch was indicted in Washington, D.C. for providing illegal abortions 16 times. In California, Leon Belous was sentenced to six months in jail for a female patient’s abortion. He was successful in his case at the state supreme court.
Dr. McHugh says if she works in the morning she risks her life as Indiana has a law that prohibits abortion but is currently blocked by the courts. NPR has reported on increased threats to abortion clinics and providers in recent years.
McHugh doesn’t believe he can risk his personal freedom and jail time for giving medical care. “I would love to show my children that I am brave in the world, but our society will not allow me to be a civil-disobedient citizen in the way that some of these articles suggest, because I would be imprisoned, I would be fined, I would lose my license and I very well could be assassinated for doing that work.”
If she were to get arrested in Texas, where she went to medical school and did her residency, King would lay out how she would make her way back to Massachusetts.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/11/23/1137756183/doctors-who-want-to-defy-abortion-laws-say-its-too-risky
The Indiana Attorney General Revisited: “On the Rokita of providing abortion services to a child’s rape victim from Ohio,” says Wynia
When you believe that the law is unjust and you don’t believe disobeying it in public will change it, there is an identified other danger in front of you that you have the resources to help. There’s a tradition of the Underground Railroad hiding Jews from the Nazis as well.
That approach is being taken by some abortion providers. Patients are being forwarded to different places to get care, thanks to the referral systems. “They’re mobilizing and [doctors] are moving and practicing in different states.”
Ultimately, health care workers need more institutional support in the face of laws they may feel are pushing them to violate their ethical obligations, says Wynia.
He wants medical facilities to say clearly that they will support clinicians who follow the same standard of care regardless of abortion laws.
Wynia says that strong leadership at the level of the institutions could cause doctors to follow their medical judgement and not delay care to consult legal experts. In the face of tough cases, he hopes doctors will think that they are not alone and that the medical establishment is behind them.
Attorneys for Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who provided abortion services to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, and her medical partner dropped their lawsuit against the state attorney general Thursday.
The lawsuit that the doctors had filed alleged that the Rokita’s office had used illegitimate consumer complaints to pursue their investigation, and asked a court to prevent the official from doing so.
In a statement Thursday, Bernard’s attorney said that with the voluntary dismissal, “we preserve our victory in court proving that the Attorney General violated Indiana law by publicly discussing the details of an investigation into Dr. Bernard which he was statutorily required to keep confidential at that stage.”
“While the motion for emergency relief was pending, AG Rokita dropped his investigation of (Bernard’s medical partner) altogether,” Attorney Kathleen DeLaney’s statement added.
A spokesperson for the state’s attorney general told CNN in a statement that the withdrawal decision “less than a week after our win in court is further confirmation that she was putting her political agenda above the privacy and safety of her 10 year old patient.”
The statement added that the court had acknowledged that any extraneous words about the attorney general’s comments didn’t have legal value.
The Indiana Department of Health says Bernard reported the abortion procedure to the department two days after it was performed. He added, ”This is what you have to do,” a source close to home
CNN has obtained documents from the Indiana Department of Health showing that Bernard reported the abortion procedure to the department two days after it was performed.