I believe that abortion to save the mother’s life is legal in all 50 states, every territory and the federal district.
There are a small number of women who have died due to their physicians and/or hospitals misinterpreting the law, just as there are patients who die every day due to physicians’ and hospitals’ mistakes. Those are issues which need to be addressed.
But — so far as I know — right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.
Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:
- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...
Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).
When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.
> right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.
The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.
This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.
For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection
How many people die because they didn't obtain an abortion in the nick of time? Is this normally an urgent service (outside of legally time-limited states?)
How many people struggle to afford buying groceries?
Looking purely at the cases where an abortion is required for health reasons:
Emergency abortions required for health reasons are often needed when things go wrong, and when that is the case it might need to be performed either soon or immediately. Being in a state that opposes it might delay the decision in ways that injure or kill the mother.
Non-emergency abortions required for health reasons - that is, when there is significant risk but it is not unfolding yet - also happen but being in a state that opposes abortions at any level in general might make it difficult - doctors not willing to suggest it to avoid risk to their business, those around you refusing the need and convincing you that it would be bad, not to mention having to plan a medical trip to a foreign location to get it done - and in turn put the mother at risk of injury or death through inaction.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the relevance of your question.
Does it somehow make it less relevant to fix a cause of death because more people die of other unrelated causes?
Far more people die in accidents than any other causes of death in the U.S., seemingly only beat by cancer and heart disease. That doesn’t make every other cause of death any less troubling or worth fixing, and it certainly does not mean that one should hold back existing treatments for “lesser” deaths or injuries.
Any avoidable injury or premature death is one too many.
