The horror stories from state abortion bans are piling up: Women facing dangerous delays in care for miscarriages. Doctors violating their training and waiting until their patient is at death’s door before performing an abortion. Pharmacists struggling to understand whether filling prescriptions for drugs that are used both for abortions and for post-miscarriage treatment opens them up to criminal charges.
Episodes in which women are needlessly denied treatment will become commonplace. The Advocate reports this disturbing account from Louisiana:
A woman who was 16 weeks pregnant had her water break, and her doctor wanted to perform a dilation and evacuation, a type of abortion procedure, to take out the fetus, which was not viable. But the doctor consulted with an attorney, who advised against it. … [T]he woman preferred the abortion, but instead “was forced to go through a painful, hours-long labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, […]