After Years of Silence, Texas Medical Board Issues Training for Doctors on How to Legally Provide Abortions

The course includes examples of when abortion is permitted to protect the life of the patient, but many experts say the complications women face in pregnancy are impossible to capture in a brief presentation.

by Cassandra Jaramillo, Kavitha Surana and Lizzie Presser – ProPublica
February 5, 2026

For the first time since Texas criminalized abortion, the state’s medical regulator is instructing doctors on when they can legally terminate a pregnancy to protect the life of the patient — guidance physicians have long sought as women died and doctors feared imprisonment for intervening.

The new training from the Texas Medical Board comes nearly five years after the state passed its strict abortion ban in 2021, threatening doctors with severe penalties. ProPublica’s reporting has shown that pregnancy became far more dangerous in the state after the law took effect: Sepsis rates spiked for women suffering a pregnancy loss, as did emergency room visits in which miscarrying patients needed a blood transfusion; at least four women in the state died after they didn’t receive timely reproductive care. More than a hundred OB-GYNs said the state’s abortion ban was to blame.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-medical-board-abortion-training-doctors

I Miscarried in Texas. My Doctors Put Abortion Law First

Jan 21, 2024
By Erin A. Snider

For nearly five hours I alternate between lying in a fetal position on our bathroom floor and curling up against the wall, shivering uncontrollably one moment, and burning up the next.

I vomit three times on the floor. I rock back and forth in tears, repeating out loud, to myself, to God, to my husband and my dog on the other side of the door, to please, please make this stop. The pain is so blinding that I think I'm hallucinating.

Continued: https://www.newsweek.com/i-miscarried-texas-doctors-abortion-law-1861677

‘I don’t know if I’m going to make it’: With abortion drug’s future in limbo, Georgia couple shares their cautionary tale

By Elizabeth Cohen and Amanda Sealy, CNN
Fri May 26, 2023

Depending on the outcome of a federal lawsuit, more women having early miscarriages could end up like Melissa Novak: septic, in the hospital and needing emergency surgery to survive. “We didn’t know if she was going to live or die,” said Novak’s husband, Stewart Day.

Novak had a miscarriage in March and was prescribed only one of the pills in a two-pill combination approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for women in her situation. Although the medication she took, called misoprostol, can help a woman have a complete and safe miscarriage, it’s not approved by the FDA to do so, and studies show that it’s less effective than when used in combination with the second drug, mifepristone.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/health/georgia-medication-abortion-miscarriage/index.html

USA – Abortion pill legal challenge threatens miscarriage care

One of the most widely used treatments for miscarriage is in jeopardy

By LAURA UNGAR AP Science Writer
May 6, 2023

Less than a year after losing her daughter Emilia at five days old, Jillian Phillips suffered a miscarriage. It was Halloween weekend in 2016, and her doctor said she could wait for it to end naturally, have a surgical procedure or take medication.

She chose the medicine, passed the remains of her nine-week pregnancy at home and buried them in a memorial garden, near some of Emilia’s ashes.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/abortion-pill-legal-challenge-threatens-miscarriage-care-99136739

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

Louisiana doctors detail unintended consequences of state’s abortion ban

BY KEITH ZUBROW, CBS NEWS
APRIL 30, 2023

"I am more likely to die than my mother was in childbirth. So as a country, our outcomes are getting worse," Dr. Rebekah Gee, an OB-GYN and a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, told 60 Minutes.

Gee was interviewed by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi as part of Sunday's report on maternal mortality rates in the United States. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of maternal death in the developed world, with Louisiana possessing some of the highest rates of any American state.

Continued: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctors-detail-unintended-consequences-of-louisiana-abortion-ban-60-minutes-2023-04-30/

30.04.2023

miscarriage management

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/

19.04.2023

Opinion

Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi

miscarriage management

SB 8

Texas Policy Evaluation Project

‘A gamechanger’: this simple device could help fight the war on abortion rights in the US

Only a tiny fraction of primary care physicians provide abortion care. Dr Joan Fleischman believes that training them in a simple and easy abortion method might be the best way to offset the war on access

by Poppy Noor
Tue 18 Apr 2023

Joan Fleischman has always had people flying in from across the world to her private abortion practice in Manhattan. In the two decades her clinic has been open, she has seen clients from places such as Ireland, the Bahamas and Mexico, who couldn’t get abortions in their home countries. In the past year, that has changed. Since the US federal right to abortion was overturned in June last year, she is now more likely to see patients flying in from her own country.

Often they are from Texas, sometimes Ohio, or Florida. Some with links to the city, others with none.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/18/abortion-reproductive-rights-manual-uterine-aspiration

USA – Opinion: Mifepristone saved my life

by Roxanne Jones
Tue April 18, 2023

The ruling earlier this month by a Texas federal judge to suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a drug that is used frequently for medication abortions, is very personal for me.

That’s because I took mifepristone years ago during a miscarriage, and it saved my life. When I was prescribed mifepristone, it had not yet taken center stage in America’s abortion wars. I did not have to make a rushed road trip across state lines to get my medicine, unlike many women who need the drug but live in one of the many states that have restricted access to medication abortion or passed near-total bans on abortion.

Continued; https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/opinions/medication-abortion-mifepristone-miscarriage-jones-ctpr/index.html

18.04.2023

Opinion

abortion pills

black maternal mortality

life-saving abortion

mifepristone

miscarriage management

The Disastrous Potential of the Texas Abortion-Pill Ruling

A nationwide ban on mifepristone would further erode doctors’ ability to provide—or learn how to provide—lifesaving care.

By Isaac Chotiner
April 11, 2023

Last week, two federal judges issued conflicting rulings on the abortion drug mifepristone, setting the stage for a clash that is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. First, a judge in Texas ruled that mifepristone would be banned nationwide in seven days. Then, a judge in Washington ordered the F.D.A. not to make any changes to the availability of the drug, which the agency approved for use more than two decades ago and which has an extensive safety record. While the legal process unfolds, abortion providers and health professionals are caught in limbo, exacerbating the challenges they have faced since last year’s Dobbs decision.

I recently spoke by phone with Jody Steinauer, the director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, to better understand how abortion care changed after Dobbs and what a ban on mifepristone would mean for women’s health care. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-disastrous-potential-of-the-texas-abortion-pill-ruling

11.04.2023