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Where is Our Compassion?
Abortion Bans Block Treatment for Miscarriage
As more states impose abortion bans, nurses and doctors are sharing how these laws put women facing miscarriage in unimaginable positions–and leave families and doctors powerless to help.
Miscarriage is common
Across the United States, 15% of pregnancies end in miscarriage—about 900,000 wanted babies lost. What many people don’t know is that many of the most common treatments for miscarriage are now banned under new abortion laws politicians passed when Roe v. Wade was overturned.
When women go into early labor with an unviable pregnancy, doctors are now prevented from inducing delivery because that is technically an abortion. Instead the woman is left waiting hours or days until the heartbeat finally stops and the doctors can assist in completing the miscarriage.
Other women in earlier stages of pregnancy are being sent home to suffer through a miscarriage alone in their bathrooms, extending their suffering and creating risks of complications.
Women forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term
As more mothers are suffering under these new laws, doctors are sharing what their patients face.
Dr. Tani Malhotra, a maternal/fetal medicine doctor, shared the impact of Ohio’s new abortion ban on mothers who learn their child will die at birth. The law forces these women to carry to term a pregnancy even when the fetus has no brain or another condition that will prevent it from surviving birth:
“They’ll be retraumatized every time anyone comes wanting to rub your belly, or wanting to ask you when you’re due, what’s the name. Everywhere you go, pregnant people get asked those things all the time.
“Every time these women have to say, ‘Oh, it’s going to die.’ That is such a personal, private thing that they shouldn’t have to share if they don’t want to. But now they’re forced to.”
Extending trauma during miscarriage
Another doctor described a situation she has already faced many times with her patients since the abortion ban took effect. The umbilical cord detached from a fetus that was too young to survive. Rather than being allowed medical care to complete the miscarriage, however, the distraught mother was instead forced to read brochures about adoption, fill out paperwork, and wait 14 hours for the heartbeat to stop.
If you think these stories are hard to read, know that women are being forced to experience them every day now in the states that have instituted abortion bans. Families and doctors are forced to stand by powerless to do anything, knowing that the lack of care also raises the risk of life-threatening or life-altering consequences for moms.
10 states make no exception for rape, incest, or when mother’s life is in danger
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Ten states now ban abortions, even in the case of rape or incest. Five more ban it before most women know they are pregnant, and eight more have bans waiting to go into effect or are currently blocked by the courts or a Democratic governor.
A few weeks after Ohio’s abortion ban took affect, a 10-year-old child rape victim who was six weeks pregnant was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion, despite her body being too young to give birth and her mind already traumatized from her assault.
In Alabama, it’s now standard practice for doctors to force women to endure an active miscarriage alone instead of helping them through it for fear of being prosecuted by the state and facing up to 99 years in prison.
In Central Texas, a hospital instructed a doctor to not treat a woman with an ectopic pregnancy until a life-threatening fallopian tube rupture occurred. Ectopic pregnancies are non-viable. Untreated, ectopic pregnancies are a leading cause of maternal death and often leave women who survive infertile afterward.
States Where Abortion is Banned with No Exceptions for Rape or Incest
Alabama
Arkansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Mississippi
Missouri
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Wisconsin
Abortion Is Banned Before Women Know They Are Pregnant
Georgia
West Virginia
Idaho
Oklahoma
Indiana
Abortions Ban Blocked by Courts and Executive Officials (Block is Temporary*)
Arizona
Iowa*
North Dakota*
South Carolina*
Michigan
Montana
Ohio*
Wyoming*
Abortion bans written by politicans looking to score political points are endangering the lives of women across America, delaying and obstructing life-saving care, and putting women in positions they should never have to face alone.
With 15% of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage, it’s only a matter of time until you, your wife, your daughter, sister, or friend is caught up in the heartless bureaucracy of these abortion bans. Every day, families and doctors are left helpless, while the women they care for are forced to endure extended suffering because some politician imposed a poorly written law.
America can be better and more compassionate than this.