Doctors on Dobbs: Abortion Providers Bear Witness to the Devastating Effects of Roe's Overturn

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Doctors on Dobbs: Abortion Providers Bear Witness to the Devastating Effects of Roe’s Overturn
10/24/2022 by Belle Taylor-McGhee

Listen to the two-minute audio version of this story, produced in collaboration with Public News Service:
abortion-doctors-womens-health-pregnancy-overturn-roe-v-wade:
https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2022-10-31/womens/doctors-tell-of-patients-hardships-after-roe-is-overturned/a81274-1


On the day the Supreme Court issued its decision, a patient in San Antonio contemplates her options after being told she can no longer get an abortion in Texas. (Gina Ferazz / Getty Images)

“We had hoped the decision would come down on one of the days we were not doing procedures,” Dr. Sanithia Williams said. “We had a waiting room full of people. People were horrified and desperate. There were people crying. There were people begging. Some people offered to pay extra if we could just do the procedure—not fully understanding what was happening. We had to turn all those people away. “To know that you have the skills to provide care at that moment and make such a difference in their life—something they have asked for—and the state has decided that [it knows] best. It was a really hard day.”

Fighting back tears, Williams, an ob-gyn and abortion provider in northern Alabama, recalls the day the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. It was the same day the state’s abortion ban went into effect—a law that allows no exception for rape or incest or lethal fetal anomaly and carries a sentence of life in prison for doctors who perform the procedure.The Alabama clinic where she worked has since closed its doors. The state now sits in the middle of what is known as an abortion desert—where people need to travel 100 miles or more, one way, to reach an abortion facility; where abortion access is virtually inaccessible.




(“After Roe Fell” / Center for Reproductive Rights)

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“It has become devastating to practice medicine,” said Dr. Ellie Ragsdale, an ob-gyn who specializes in high-risk obstetrics and fetal therapy at an academic medical center in Cleveland. “You come to work every day and hope that the decisions you make are the best decisions for your patients, and that those decisions don’t land you in jail.” Many worry that in this post-Roe landscape, women will die because they are too sick to carry a pregnancy to term. “We have seen women who had major medical care morbidities when their life was at risk by pregnancy who had to leave our state to have a termination,” Ragsdale said. “We have seen patients who had lethal fetal malformations—babies who had no chance to survive outside the womb—who had to leave our state for a termination.”
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One solution is to expand the use of abortion pills, which can be safely self-administered until the 11th week of pregnancy. But while courts have ruled that banning medication abortion is unconstitutional, this has not stopped a wave of restrictive state laws limiting access to this effective, nonsurgical method. According to Guttmacher, “29 states now require that clinicians who administer medication abortion be physicians; two states prohibit medication abortion after a specific point early in a pregnancy; and 19 states require the clinician providing a medication abortion to be physically present when the medication is administered, prohibiting the use of telemedicine to prescribe medication for abortion.” Meanwhile, major medical institutions, including the World Health Organization; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; and the National Abortion Federation, have found that mid-level providers, such as physician assistants and advanced practice nurses, can safely provide medication abortion—and they can do so by mail.

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When it comes to reporting women for self-managed abortions, Dr. Jamila Perritt urged other doctors, “Just don’t do it. Do not call the police on your patient.” (Shala W. Graham / Shutterstock)
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https://msmagazine.com/2022/10/24/abortion-doctors-womens-health-pregnancy-overturn-roe-v-wade/