Choolia's Medblr

A pregnant woman in Louisiana says she’s being forced to choose between carrying fetus that lacks a skull and the top of its head (as a result of a rare condition called acrania) to term, or traveling several states over for a legal abortion, since Louisiana has banned abortion with very narrow exceptions.

“It’s hard knowing that I’m carrying it to bury it,” Nancy Davis, who’s 13 weeks pregnant and is already the mother of one child, told local news station WAFB9 on Monday. A few weeks ago, she had her first ultrasound and was told the fetus wouldn’t survive—but that she would have to either carry and birth the nonviable fetus or travel to Florida, the closest state where abortion is still legal. Davis is running out of time to make her decision, however, because Florida bans the health service at 15 weeks.

Last Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court allowed the state’s ban—which bans care except to save a pregnant person’s life or in some cases when the fetus won’t survive—to take effect, though litigation to block the ban remains ongoing. Louisiana’s ban includes an exception for some fetal conditions, but acrania isn’t on the Louisiana Department of Health’s narrow list of qualifying conditions.

Louisiana’s ban—and certainly, the constant legal back-and-forth around it—is already taking a massive toll on the state’s health care system that will only get worse now that all three of the state’s clinics were forced to permanently relocate out-of-state on Monday. Before Davis, one Louisiana doctor testified in an affidavit challenging the ban that her patient was forced to endure a “painful, hours-long labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, despite her wishes and best medical advice,” after the ban temporarily took effect last month.

The doctor, Valerie Williams, said her patient was “screaming—not from pain, but from the emotional trauma she was experiencing.” It took hours for the woman’s placenta to deliver, causing her to hemorrhage about a liter of blood which placed her own life in danger. A simple abortion procedure would have lasted 15 minutes, Williams said. She claimed this was “the first time in my 15-year career that I could not give a patient the care they needed.” The state threatens doctors and abortion providers who violate the ban with 10 to 15 years in prison. Louisiana doctors have told Jezebel the ban has forced them to fear they “could go to prison just for handling a miscarriage as I always have.”

Both Davis’ story and Williams’ testimony show the ban’s supposed exceptions are pretty ineffective in practice: Davis is literally being forced to carry a fetus missing part of its head, and Williams’ patient’s life was endangered by the unsafe delivery of her nonviable fetus. Doctors have previously pointed out that exceptions for threats to the pregnant person’s life are too ambiguous to actually help pregnant people. “How close to death must a patient be?” an attorney for Louisiana’s abortion providers asked last month. “Doctors are unsure what counts as a ‘medically futile’ pregnancy.’” Further, in some countries, being forced to carry a dead fetus has resulted in pregnant people developing fatal infections when doctors are too afraid of criminal charges to help.

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🍪🥚 Cookie Monster Ovary 🥚🍪

Today’s ihearthisto is brought to you by the letter O for Oocyte!

i♡histo

This is image shows a high magnification view of a slice through an ovary.

You are looking at four tiny primordial follicles (the cookies above Cookie Monster’s head) located in the outer cortex of the ovary. Each of these follicles contains a single dormant, immature egg (a primary oocyte) that is halted in the the first phase of meiosis (prophase I). Eventually these follicles will be recruited to enter the maturation cycle that, against all the odds, could see them develop into an embryo.

Cookie monster himself is a larger multilaminar primary follicle (the cookie in his mouth is the nucleus of the oocyte within the follicle). This type of follicle has already been recruited and it’s follicular cells are dividing and differentiating. The oocyte within it though is still halted in prophase I of meiosis.