If you are a woman living in a Red state you are a second-class citizen, and you better get used to that. If you are a woman or girl and need gynecological care for any one of a host of reasons you may find you can’t get it. If you are pregnant and something goes awry, your life is at risk because non-doctor Republicans in state legislatures, who don’t even seem to understand the medical reality of pregnancy, write laws so threatening to the doctors that they may not be able to help you, and your only option is to go to a state controlled by Democrats. What amazes me is that millions of women vote Republican assuring their second-class status, and second-class health care. Here is a fact-based report that demonstrates the truth of what I am saying.
Sitting at her computer one day in late December, Dr. Sarah Osmundson mustered her best argument to approve an abortion for a suffering patient.
The woman was 14 weeks pregnant when she learned her fetus was developing without a skull. This increased the likelihood of a severe buildup of amniotic fluid, which could cause her uterus to rupture and possibly kill her. Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who helps patients navigate high-risk pregnancies, knew that outcome was uncommon, but she had seen it happen.
She drafted an email to her colleagues on the Nashville hospital’s abortion committee, arguing that the risk was significant enough to meet the slim exception to Tennessee’s strict abortion ban, which allows termination only when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” She pleaded with her fellow doctors to spare this woman the […]
