A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana
Nov. 1, 2024

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala


SCOTUS v. Pregnant Patients: Idaho’s Abortion Fight Could Blow Up a “Revolutionary” Health Care Law

“My reaction can be summed up as ‘appalled,’” says health policy guru Sara Rosenbaum.

NINA MARTIN, Mother Jones
Apr 27, 2024

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in what could end up being its most consequential abortion decision since Dobbs. In a case pitting Idaho’s extreme abortion ban against a federal law known as EMTALA—that since 1986 has required hospitals to provide emergency care—conservative justices seemed to embrace the idea that states can deny crisis medical treatment to pregnant patients, even if doing so means those patients suffer catastrophic, life-altering injuries. “My reaction can be summed up as ‘appalled,’” says Sara Rosenbaum, emerita professor at George Washington University who is one of the country’s foremost experts in health policy issues affecting women and families. “Will [the court] really say it is fine [to enforce] a law that costs women their organs as long as they don’t die?”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/scotus-v-pregnant-patients-idahos-abortion-fight-could-blow-up-a-revolutionary-health-care-law/


Anti-abortion states are targeting an emergency healthcare law. Will the supreme court side with them?

Justices to rule whether abortion bans should undo Emtala, the Reagan-era law requiring hospitals to treat emergency patients

Jessica Glenza
Sun 21 Apr 2024

One of the only universal rights to healthcare in the US is to be treated in the emergency room – a place where doctors are required to stabilize patients if their future health or life is in serious jeopardy.

That right, guaranteed by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known across the country by healthcare professionals as Emtala, was borne out of what was once a common practice called “patient dumping” – transferring patients who could not pay from private hospitals to public counterparts, even in emergency situations.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/apr/21/emtala-supreme-court-abortion


Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant women, leaving one to miscarry in a lobby restroom

BY AMANDA SEITZ
April 19, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to check her in. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.

Continued: https://apnews.com/article/pregnancy-emergency-care-abortion-supreme-court-roe-9ce6c87c8fc653c840654de1ae5f7a1c