A year after promising viewers a “red tsunami” in the 2022 midterms, only to be left with egg on their faces after the GOP drastically underperformed, Fox News was once again wondering what went wrong after Democrats romped to victory in statewide elections on Tuesday night.
Despite recent polls showing President Joe Biden deeply underwater with voters and even losing to Donald Trump in several battleground states, the Democratic incumbent governor easily won victory over his MAGA-endorsed opponent in deep-red Kentucky. And over in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment ensuring access to abortion care in the state’s constitution.
The continued drag that undoing Roe v. Wade has had on the GOP was especially apparent in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had promised to implement a 15-week abortion ban if the GOP was able to gain unified control over the state’s General Assembly. Instead, not only were Youngkin’s hopes of a Republican sweep dashed, but the Democrats now control both chambers.
And don’t forget the “life of the mother” exceptions in places like Texas that can only be triggered if the woman is actively dying. If she’s not close enough to death, it is still “carry it to term or else.”
Hey, but the doctor and all the medical staff could bet their medical licenses that the legal gray area would favor them in a particular case.
Of course it might be harder to practice medicine after the hospital execs consult with legal and fire your ass.
But hey, there’s an off chance that legally you could get away with saving the life of the mother before death was imminent. Well, depending on the judge in Texas that day.
It’s not going to matter, since clinicians who don’t want to practice OB/GYN under the oversight of non-clinicians out to criminalize pregnancy are already moving out of those states, with more to follow. Pregnant women (and sometimes simply women of possibly fertile age) are going to have a much harder time accessing adequate healthcare, period.
When the law threatens any clinician who addresses a woman’s healthcare as having a personhood and a body that is far more than a breeding sack, or potential breeding sack, and subjects medical decisions to untrained (and completely fucking loony) political oversight, and even makes their practice of medicine subject to criminal charges, they leave.
Not just OB/GYNs, but oncologists and other specialists who use treatments non-compatible with fetal life are going to have no choice but to leave – or to stay and try to hew as closely to these vague and loosely defined laws as they possibly can, knowing that if they fail they will be made legal examples of for the far right.
Hospitals in red states are already losing graduating interns, and without interns many hospital units just don’t run, especially in emergency medicine. Hospitals are already finding it harder and harder to staff at all, and some are closing down. Idaho was down at least two maternity units within months of the Roe reversal, and that’s just the start.
Unfortunately, what I see happening is far worse than even your own dire scenario: that pregnancy remains criminalized, but without clinicians willing to deal with pregnant women, many women just won’t seek help in standard settings at all, or won’t be able to get it if they do because now the demand is far greater than the supply. Many will be forced back into 19th century home deliveries – and when some of those fail, as they inevitably will, that woman will be prosecuted for the crime of not having healthcare and delivering a non-viable baby, because now miscarriage is abortion until proved otherwise, and abortion is a crime.
And at least some of them will just die. In all centuries past, throughout history, childbirth has been the #1 killer of women, ALL women, rich or poor, even the wives of kings. Stroll through old cemeteries, and most of the women’s markers have a date of death prior to the age of 30. That’s what happens when you have no way of addressing sepsis or other complications in pregnancy, and what we are marching back toward as a nation.
EDITED for clarity
Its also going to be hard to practice medicine when a distraught husband pays a visit to your office to discuss why you let their wife die. It’s Texas, too. So not only will a doctor have to get yelled at and threatened, he will be yelled at and threatened by the hysterically upset and armed man in his office who has nothing to lose.