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Although a lot of attention has focused on how the new Maine abortion bill — LD 1619 — affects pregnancies that involve severe fetal deformities, it also helps women avoid serious harm and death.
Being pregnant can be joyous and wonderful, but it’s also inherently risky.
While many say the United States has the best health care system in the world, our maternal mortality rate is terrible compared with other wealthy countries. More than three times the number of women per 100,000 died compared with other high-income countries, either leaving babies without mothers or a double tragedy with both dead. Moreover, U.S. rates are on the rise, with especially high rates among Black women.
Surely we should do everything we can to care for pregnant women.
Yet some doctors who should be following medical standards of care are worried about losing their licenses or being prosecuted and so delay providing abortion care aimed at saving women’s lives and protecting their health.
That’s why five women brought a lawsuit against Texas. These women wanted to get pregnant but then had serious complications. Although the state’s abortion law has exceptions about the life and health of the mother, doctors were concerned about legality. Because doctors waited to provide care, these women got very sick, could have died and some suffered needless harm that will make it more difficult for them to conceive and continue a pregnancy.
Delaying cancer treatment is dangerous, as it allows cancer to grow and spread, making remission less likely and shortening lives. Yet, as The New York Times reports, “in Texas, oncologists say they now wait for pregnant women with cancer to get sicker before they treat them” instead of following the “standard of care … to abort the fetus rather than allow treatments that damage it.”
Harms to women happen when doctors are worried about using their own judgment and acting congruent with medical standards — and this isn’t just in places like Texas with near-bans on abortion.
Since Roe was overturned last year, OB-GYNs are finding it harder to care for patients with miscarriages and emergencies and to operate according to standards of care, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found. While this occurs more where abortion laws are strictest, it also happens elsewhere. Nearly 7 in 10 of these doctors say the Supreme Court decision worsened “management of pregnancy related medical emergencies.”
Thus language in abortion laws about the mother’s life and health leaves too much up in the air to ensure that doctors can make recommendations and take actions that provide needed care to pregnant women.
The new Maine abortion bill protects women’s health with explicit language that post-viability abortions “may be performed only when it is necessary in the professional judgment of the physician … [who] shall apply the applicable standard of care in making a professional judgment.”
Those standards do not allow for abortion late in the pregnancy of a healthy woman with a healthy fetus, but rather enable doctors to keep pregnant women alive and not suffer needless complications and harm.
While medicine is complicated, these situations come down to fundamental issues of freedom, about who decides about one of the most critical matters in a woman’s life.
If you or someone you love was pregnant and had a medical emergency, who would you want to decide how they’re treated, including whether to have an abortion?
If it was discovered late in a pregnancy that you or someone you love was pregnant with a fetus that could not live outside of the uterus, who should make the decision about whether to have an abortion?
If you or someone you love was pregnant and then cancer was diagnosed, who should make the decision about whether to continue the pregnancy?
Most people don’t want a politician in the emergency or examination room. They want doctors to use their professional skills and rely on medical standards of care. They want doctors to try to keep pregnant women alive and safe, and that’s what LD 1619 does.
