How close to death must a woman be to get an abortion in Tennessee?

The strictest abortion law in the US doesn’t allow exceptions for medical emergencies – and efforts to change it face powerful opposition from the right

Stephanie Kirchgaessner
Mon 20 Mar 2023

Months after the implementation of the most stringent abortion ban in the country, conservative lawmakers in Tennessee have publicly acknowledged that the state’s ban poses grave risks to the lives of women.

Now a political debate over how to change the law is centered on questions that would have been considered unthinkable before last June’s reversal of Roe v Wade: like how close to death a woman must be before a doctor may legally treat her if it means terminating her pregnancy, and whether women should be forced to carry embryos with fatal anomalies to term.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/20/tennessee-abortion-ban-strictist-in-us

Doctors Warned Her Pregnancy Could Kill Her. Then Tennessee Outlawed Abortion.

A Tennessee mother wanted to end her high-risk pregnancy, but doctors feared prosecution.

by Kavitha Surana, photography by Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
March 14, 2023

This story graphically describes serious complications in pregnancies and births, and it mentions suicide.

One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.

Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-abortion-ban-doctors-ectopic-pregnancy

‘I cried with her’: the diary of a doctor navigating a total abortion ban

When Tennessee passed one of the US’s strictest abortion bans, Dr Leilah Zahedi-Spung was unable to care for her patients

Poppy Noor
Wed 22 Feb 2023

Dr Leilah Zahedi-Spung always knew providing abortion care in Tennessee was going to be hard, but she probably never could have imagined how hard. On 25 August 2022, 18 months after Zahedi-Spung landed a dream job as a maternal fetal medicine specialist, the state enacted one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, one that does not even make explicit exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person.

Tennessee’s ban makes performing or attempting to perform an abortion a Class C felony – meaning Zahedi-Spung could have faced a 15-year-prison sentence for providing life-saving care. So, in January 2023, she decided to leave for work in Colorado, where abortion is still legal in all stages of pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/22/diary-doctor-navigating-total-abortion-ban-tennessee

22.02.2023

In open letter, 700 Tennessee healthcare providers call on Legislature to ‘reconsider’ abortion ban

BY: ANITA WADHWANI
OCTOBER 10, 2022

More than 700 Tennessee doctors, nurses and other medical professionals are calling on the state’s GOP-super majority Legislature to revisit an abortion ban that criminalizes the procedure with no exceptions and subjects doctors who perform it to prosecution, fines and jail time.

In an open letter to the legislature, published in a full page ad in The Tennessean on Sunday, the healthcare professionals are asking the General Assembly to “reconsider the ‘trigger law.'”

Continued: https://tennesseelookout.com/briefs/in-open-letter-700-tennessee-healthcare-providers-call-on-legislature-to-reconsider-abortion-ban/

10.10.2022

Her mother’s abortion was required under China’s one-child policy. Her own would be illegal under Tennessee’s post-Roe ban

by Eric Boodman
Sept. 29, 2022

It started as a joke. Jen was early in her first pregnancy, sitting with her husband after lunch. You know those gimmicky websites, he was saying, where you can name a star after someone and the person gets a certificate in the mail? What if, instead, we named our child after the biggest planet in the solar system?

He was kidding, but Jen kind of liked it. Jupiter. She liked the sound of it — and how awesome, to share a name with something so huge, encircled by so many moons. She hadn’t imagined herself as a mom. When they were looking at houses, she’d insisted on a yard for their dog; she hadn’t been thinking about room for kids. But then something in her shifted, and here they were, in their dining room, in a green-lawned Tennessee neighborhood, joking about what to call their first child. Jupiter was a perfect middle name — semi-secret, a nod to this wild gravitational pull.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2022/09/29/abortion-roe-tennessee-ban-fetal/

29.09.2022

Fear, confusion, anxiety, stress: Tennessee doctors describe care under abortion ban

They worry about what consequences they may face for providing essential care.

By Nadine El-Bawab
September 16, 2022

Weeks after a trigger ban criminalizing providing abortions went into effect in Tennessee, doctors told ABC News the ban created fear, confusion, anxiety and stress among patients and providers.

Physicians from different parts of the state are pushing back against claims made by lawmakers, including Gov. Bill Lee, who say the ban allows exceptions for pregnancies that threaten a woman's life or could cause serious bodily injury, saying this is not the case. Under the law, performing or attempting to perform an abortion is a Class C felony.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/fear-confusion-anxiety-stress-tennessee-doctors-describe-care/story?id=89878848

Lawyer’s mission: Translate Tenn.’s bewildering abortion ban

Chloe Akers considers herself a grizzled criminal defense attorney

By CLAIRE GALOFARO, AP National Writer
September 4, 2022

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Chloe Akers considers herself a grizzled criminal defense attorney. Until a few months ago, she didn’t spend much time thinking about abortion — for all her 39 years, abortion was not a crime, so she’d never imagined having to defend someone accused of performing one.

That changed in June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Akers sat down in her law office and pulled up Tennessee’s new criminal abortion statute.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/lawyers-mission-translate-tenns-bewildering-abortion-ban-89341542

A Planned Parenthood Was Burned Down. This Is Just the Latest in Knoxville’s War Over Abortion

This is the second violent act against the clinic since an evangelical protest organization moved in a year ago, ramping up anti-abortion rhetoric in the city

By MARISA KABAS
Jan 7, 2022

As the ruins of the Knoxville Planned Parenthood smoldered in the background, vocal Pastor Ken Peters, a prominent anti-abortion figure, spoke to a reporter from the local ABC affiliate. “This is not gonna stop abortion,” he told them. “It’s the changing of hearts and minds, it’s the changing of laws. This might temporarily halt abortion, but this doesn’t stop it. We just pray that nobody was hurt and that who whoever did this is caught and prosecuted, and we pray that abortion would stop right here in the state of Tennessee.”

This past New Year’s Eve, less than one year after a gunman shot out the glass doors of the Planned Parenthood in Knoxville, Tennessee, the entire clinic burned to the ground in the midst of a $2.2 million renovation and expansion project. (No one was injured.) Investigators from the Knoxville Fire Department have ruled it an intentional fire — an arson, started by a person or persons who, just like the gunman, have yet to be identified. As investigators continue putting together the pieces, abortion rights activists can’t help but wonder: Did the rhetoric of Pastor Peters’s extreme anti-abortion church literally help stoke the flames?

Continued: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/knoxville-planned-parenthood-fire-arson-1280947/

Long Drives, Costly Flights, And Wearying Waits: What Abortion Requires In The South

August 2, 2021
SARAH VARNEY

Just a quick walk through the parking lot of Choices-Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, in this legendary music mecca, speaks volumes about access to abortion in the American South. Parked alongside the polished SUVs and weathered sedans with Tennessee license plates are cars from Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida and, on many days, Alabama, Georgia and Texas.

Choices is one of two abortion clinics in the Memphis metro area, with a population of 1.3 million. While that might not seem like much for women seeking a commonplace medical procedure, it represents a wealth of access compared with Mississippi, which has just one abortion clinic for the entire state of 3 million people.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/02/1022860226/long-drives-costly-flights-and-wearying-waits-what-abortion-requires-in-the-sout

USA – The strictest abortion ban in the nation targets communities of color

Tina Vasquez
Jul 03, 2020

As pro-choice advocates in Louisiana breathe a sigh of relief after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the June Medical Services case last week, Tennessee is gearing up for a fight against one of the most restrictive anti-abortion bills in the country—one that advocates say targets people of color.

Used as a bargaining chip while negotiating the state budget, the bill was passed in the early morning hours of June 19 when the Tennessee Senate made a last-minute deal with the House to pass a six-week abortion ban, which is unconstitutional because it makes it medically and logistically impossible for most people to determine that they are pregnant and arrange for abortion care.

Continued: https://www.ourprism.org/1957853