‘How sick is sick enough?’ Abortion bans leave providers, patients questioning when care is OK

Saturday, September 2, 2023
By Elise Catrion Gregg | News21

AUSTIN, Texas — Amanda and Josh Zurawski sit in the house they bought last year, the dream home they intended to share with their future daughter.

They’ve told their story too many times now, but they brace themselves to tell it once more — from a room just above the backyard where they will one day plant a tree in memory of the baby who never made it home.
It will be a willow, in honor of the name they chose for their little girl.

Continued: https://nondoc.com/2023/09/02/how-sick-is-sick-enough-abortion-bans-leave-providers-patients-questioning-when-care-is-ok/


Abortion providers on two years of Texas ban: ‘We’re living in a devastating reality’

Senate Bill 8 wiped out almost all abortion care in the second-most populous state in the US, and served as a harbinger of what was to come over the rest of the country

by Mary Tuma
Thu 31 Aug 2023

Nearly a year before the US supreme court eviscerated Roe v Wade, the court allowed an unprecedented abortion ban to take effect in Texas, serving as a harbinger of what was to sweep over the rest of the country.

…. In the two years since, Texas abortion providers – some of the first in the US to experience a nearly post-Roe world – reflect on the devastating and lasting effect of the severe law, the trauma they felt denying patients care, and the struggle they faced when deciding whether or not to flee the state or stay put.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/31/texas-abortion-ban-senate-bill-8


USA – Abortion Bans Threaten All Pregnancy Care

Abortion bans are not only inhumane, they are also imprecise, hinging on medically inaccurate beliefs.

SEP 1, 2022
DR. GHAZALEH MOAYEDI & WHITNEY AREY

With the Supreme Court’s recent overturn of Roe v. Wade, many people in the United States have lost community access to life-saving abortion care. At Texas Policy Evaluation Project, our latest research in Texas documents how abortion bans and their threat of civil and criminal penalties negatively impact the health care of all pregnant people in our state.

Enacted a year ago today, Texas SB 8 restricts abortion at about five to six weeks’ gestation, before many people even know they’re pregnant. After its implementation, we have witnessed both the devastating impacts on abortion access and the emotional consequences for pregnant people seeking abortion care. At the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, our recent study found that the abortion restrictions in SB 8 also created a chilling effect for clinicians who care for pregnant people and adversely affected patients experiencing medical complications during their pregnancies.

Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2022/09/01/abortion-bans-threaten-all-pregnancy-care/


‘A Massive Ripple Effect’: Oklahoma Banning Abortion Will Worsen a Crisis

One Oklahoma abortion provider says she keeps "finding staff members crying in corners."

By Susan Rinkunas
April 4, 2022

Oklahoma, the state to which droves of Texans have been fleeing to access abortion, is itself on the verge of banning abortion. Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a provider in both states, could tell during her shifts last week that the impending laws were weighing on the minds of her colleagues. “They’ve been taking care of folks through the fallout,” she told Jezebel Thursday. “It has hit them so differently that now this is their home that it’s gonna happen to, too. I kept turning a corner and finding staff members crying in corners, just trying to really emotionally process what they’re about to go through.”

In the spring of 2020, after Texas Governor Greg Abbott dubiously shut down abortion clinics by executive order, Dr. Moayedi, who’d been providing abortions in Texas since 2004, realized it was time to get licensed in neighboring Oklahoma.

Continued: https://jezebel.com/a-massive-ripple-effect-oklahoma-banning-abortion-wi-1848745388


USA – Not Just Abortion: How Criminalization of Pregnancy Also Impacts Miscarriage Care

Abortion and the management of pregnancy loss, combined with the risk posed by criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes, only hurts pregnant people

Dec 3, 2021
Caroline Reilly, Rewire News.

“She gave me the pills—I think about this all the time—in an unmarked manila envelope and told me what to do with them when I got home,” said Kate, who received misoprostol for a missed miscarriage in the first trimester of her pregnancy in 2017. At her ten-week checkup, she had a negative pregnancy test. At an ultrasound appointment a few days later, her doctor explained it was a blighted ovum, a miscarriage of an embryo that had stopped developing.

Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/12/03/not-just-abortion-how-criminalization-of-pregnancy-also-impacts-miscarriage-care/


Texas Abortion Law Complicates Care for Risky Pregnancies

Doctors in Texas say they cannot head off life-threatening medical crises in pregnant women if abortions cannot be offered or even discussed.

By Roni Caryn Rabin
Nov. 26, 2021

A few weeks after Texas adopted the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, Dr. Andrea Palmer delivered terrible news to a Fort Worth patient who was midway through her pregnancy.

The fetus had a rare neural tube defect. The brain would not develop, and the infant would die at birth or shortly afterward. Carrying the pregnancy to term would be emotionally grueling and would also raise the mother’s risk of blood clots and severe postpartum bleeding, the doctor warned.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/health/texas-abortion-law-risky-pregnancy.html


OB-GYN struggles to navigate care under Texas abortion law

October 31, 2021

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an OB-GYN in Texas, about the state of reproductive rights two months after the passage of Senate Bill 8, a restrictive abortion law.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Tomorrow the Supreme Court begins oral arguments in what could be one of the most consequential abortion rights cases in decades, United States v. Texas. That's a federal challenge to that state's restrictive abortion law, known as Senate Bill 8, that went into effect in early September. That bill bans abortion after six weeks and, as you've probably heard, also sets up a bounty program for individuals to get paid for reporting people who violate it. It's been in effect for nearly two months. A study from the University of Texas at Austin found that the number of abortions performed last month dropped 50% compared to last year.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/31/1050980382/ob-gyn-struggles-to-navigate-care-under-texas-abortion-law


Please, Talk to Your Kids About Abortion

OCT. 25, 2021
By Danielle Campoamor

My oldest son has always shown an aptitude for math and science. (I blame his father.) He’s fascinated by the human body, too. At the tender age of 4 (he’s now 7 years old), my partner and I bought him a book detailing the ins and outs of human anatomy, and he’d more often than not fall asleep with it across his chest, open to some page on the cardiovascular system. He uses the correct terminology for both a penis and a vagina, understands that sex can result in a pregnancy, and, to the surprise of many, what abortion is — and that his mom has had one.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/talk-to-kids-about-abortion.html


How Texas Has Made My Job of Helping Women More Dangerous

Sept. 20, 2021
By Ghazaleh Moayedi

It’s not brave for me to be an abortion provider in Texas. This is my home, too. I have a lot of support from my community. I work at several types of clinics here and in Oklahoma — independent ones, mostly. I went to medical school with the express intent to provide abortions in my home state.

We were shut down in Texas before, when Covid first hit the state in March of last year and Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order suspending “all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary.” At first, we weren’t sure how it was going to be interpreted. I spent that Monday calling all the patients I could, telling them to come in immediately to get an ultrasound in the event I would be able to at least give them pills the next day.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/texas-abortion-provider.html


Texas OB/GYN: My Existence Is In Violation Of The New Abortion Law

August 29, 2021
NPR

Ahead of Texas' abortion ban going into effect on Sept. 1, NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an OB/GYN, about what it means for abortion providers and patients there.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Texas has passed one of the nation's most restrictive abortion bans, and it is just days from becoming law. Barring legal challenges, Senate Bill 8 is set to go into effect on Wednesday. The law signed by Governor Greg Abbott this spring bans abortions as early as six weeks after conception and allows Texans to sue anyone who aids, abets or performs an abortion past that mark. There are no exemptions for cases involving rape or incest.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/29/1032259863/texas-ob-gyn-my-existence-is-in-violation-of-the-new-abortion-law