In the Post-Roe Era, Letting Pregnant Patients Get Sicker—by Design

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

“You Know What? I’m Not Doing This Anymore.”

There’s a quiet new crisis brewing in Texas following the abortion ban. It could get much worse.

BY SOPHIE NOVACK
MARCH 21, 2023

For three days last fall, Leah Wilson entered her pregnant patient’s hospital room and checked the fetus for a heartbeat. She was waiting for it to stop. The woman’s water had broken at just 19 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability, causing an infection in her uterus. The fetus would not survive, but until it died, or the woman’s condition worsened, there was little the hospital would do, said Wilson, who was her nurse at the time.

Typically in this kind of situation, doctors would terminate the pregnancy to prevent a life-threatening infection or other serious complication. But this patient was in Texas, where abortion is no longer legal.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/texas-abortion-law-doctors-nurses-care-supreme-court.html

USA – New abortion laws jeopardize cancer treatment for pregnant patients

Cancer treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy can be toxic to a developing fetus or cause birth defects.

September 24, 2022
By Charlotte Huff, Kaiser Health News

As abortion bans go into effect across a contiguous swath of the South, cancer physicians are wrestling with how new state laws will influence their discussions with pregnant patients about what treatment options they can offer.

Cancer coincides with roughly 1 in 1,000 pregnancies, most frequently breast cancer, melanoma, cervical cancer, lymphomas, and leukemias. But medications and other treatments can be toxic to the developing fetus or cause birth defects. In some cases, hormones that are supercharged during pregnancy fuel the cancer’s growth, putting the patient at greater risk.

Continued: https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2022/09/24/new-abortion-laws-jeopardize-cancer-treatment-for-pregnant-patients/