Opinion | When Pregnant Patients ‘Become Radioactive to Emergency Departments’

I thought I would follow up my Tuesday column on abortion rights with this report from The Associated Press, on the state of emergency services for pregnant women.

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.

The A.P. goes on to note that in states where lawmakers have either effectively banned abortion or issued extreme restrictions on the procedure, pregnant patients have “become radioactive to emergency departments.” Doctors do not want to risk fines, criminal charges and potentially jail time for ending a pregnancy, even when it’s medically necessary to save the life of the patient. The result, as The A.P. shows, is needless suffering:

The staff at Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro, N. C., told a pregnant woman who was complaining of stomach pain that they would not be able to provide her with an ultrasound. The staff failed to tell her how risky it could be for her to depart without being stabilized, according to federal investigators. While en route to another hospital 45 minutes away, the woman gave birth in a car to a baby who did not survive.

In many states where abortion bans and restrictions have undermined maternal care, the laws have exceptions for rape, incest, certain fetal abnormalities and the life of the mother. In theory, those exceptions are supposed to give medical providers the leeway to end pregnancies when necessary. In practice, they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. When you’ve created a punitive legal environment for a medical procedure, it does not matter how many exceptions you write into the law. You’ve created a world in which doctors will hesitate or refuse to perform that procedure, no matter what.

Republican lawmakers do not seem too concerned with the fact that there are no real exceptions to their abortion laws. The laws, it seems, are working as intended.

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was about the resurrection of Arizona’s 19th-century abortion law and what it tells us about how democracy is going in the states.

The states’ rights case for determining abortion access — let the people decide — falters on the fact that in many states, the people cannot shape their legislature to their liking. Packed and split into districts designed to preserve Republican control, voters cannot actually dislodge anti-abortion Republican lawmakers. A pro-choice majority may exist, but only as a shadow: present but without substance in government.

My Friday column was on the United Auto Workers’ drive to unionize the auto plants of the South, which won a key victory on Friday, and how that fits into the history of the political economy of the region.

Organized labor was and remains a threat to the political and economic elites of a region whose foremost commitment is to the maintenance of an employer-dominated economy of low-wage labor and its attendant social order.

And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1995 cyberpunk thriller “Johnny Mnemonic.”