Fearing legal repercussions, doctors in Texas say they are risking grave patient harm to comply with new abortion restrictions.

By Stephania Taladrid
May 6, 2023

Parkland Memorial Hospital is an elegantly landscaped, blue-glass facility gleaming in the concrete expanse of what was once a manufacturing district in Dallas. The sole public hospital in a city of nearly 1.3 million people, it’s also a beacon in the state. People in medical distress travel to see its doctors from rural towns hundreds of miles away, and some of those distressed patients are pregnant.

Half of the counties in Texas, according to state data, lack a single specialist in women’s health: no ob-gyn, no nurse, no midwife who can treat mothers and their babies. But Parkland, one of thirty-two hospitals credentialled to treat high-risk-pregnancy cases, takes all comers. More than ten thousand babies are born there every year, and pregnant people also show up in its hectic emergency room with conditions that threaten their lives. Some patients have hemorrhages and spiralling infections; some are critically ill with cancer or heart disease; some are at acute risk of stroke if they bring their pregnancies to term.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/in-the-post-roe-era-letting-pregnant-patients-get-sicker-by-design