One of my best friends works in an ER in a state where there hasn't been a ruling on abortion in almost 100 years, but because that law is anti-abortion unless the life of the mother is under *eminent threat* they cannot perform ANY abortion procedures until you are actively going under.
They had a woman come in maybe 2 months after Roe v Wade was overturned. She was a day or so post-miscarriage. It was her 2nd miscarriage. She and her husband had been trying for YEARS. They were paying THOUSANDS for fertility treatments and thought it would work this time. She was sobbing. Her husband was sobbing.
But more importantly... they came in because she had just collapsed and was having bouts of dizziness.
An ultrasound my friend performed confirmed 2 things:
She had had an incomplete natural evacuation. There was still a fair amount of tissue in her uterus, which would definitely be decomposing by that point (the uterus is not a sterile environment).
There was no heartbeat. None. Not a single contracting cell.
They called Legal, because they knew exactly what was going to happen. This woman, unless given an artificial evacuation (aka... an abortion), would become septic. Legal said, "You can't until her vitals drop. In the eyes of the law, if she could technically pass the tissue naturally until the moment before you intervene, you have performed a medically unnecessary abortion. Anyone who assists will be stripped of their medical credentials and put on trial for murder, and the hospital cannot defend you and will not be held responsible."
There was nothing the woman or the family could sign. There was no loophole. My friend went over the vitals collected by her nurse all night, but she hadn't crashed yet. Just slowly became more and more delirious from the infection spreading from the dead tissue. The only medications they could even give to ease her suffering were meds/doses approved for actively pregnant women.
Her husband could only sit there and watch.
When the woman's blood pressure suddenly dropped, they rushed her into the OR for the evacuation/abortion, which they'd had prepped for her. At that point, my friend's line of care was over. The doctors who took over the case said she was being recommended to internal surgery because her uterine tissue has started going necrotic as well, and would need to be removed.
This meant her chance to have her own baby would drop to almost nothing.
Before Roe v Wade was overturned, this would have been an upsetting in-and-out trip to the ER after a terrible, terrible day. My friend barely would have batted an eye after the 5 minutes of sympathy she could have afforded before moving to the next patient.
But because it happened after, this woman lost her baby, nearly lost her life, and permanently lost any ability to carry a child to term in one long, shitty, horrific weekend. Infections like that are extremely damaging to the body as well; she may have permanent side effects.
FOR DEAD TISSUE. Dead. The baby was dead already. It was already gone. It was so dead and gone that it was ROTTING inside her.
While much less damaging, my friend and her team were permanently scarred by this event. She'd been in this small town ER for almost a decade by that point, she went through the COVID shutdown in that hospital, she's seen UGLY, haunting things and told me the HIPPA versions with a completely straight face.
She could barely get the words out on this story. She choked on the guilt. She cried, and she'd never cried over a medical story to me before.
I told a Pro-Life woman this story once. I told her, "If your daughter has complications with her pregnancy, you have to get her to [state where abortion is legal] immediately, no matter what it costs. This is what is happening here."
She cried. She cried just hearing about it, third-hand. Because of course she did. It's horrifying. It's undeniably WRONG.
And when she claimed that this must have been some cruel twist of a law taken too far, some unfortunate, unforeseen side effect... I reminded her that this is what was happening before Roe v. Wade, and in living memory of the Supreme Court and sitting members of congress. Because Roe v Wade was ruled on in 1973. And those old fucks all remember 1972.
They just don't care about making exceptions, because exceptions mean loopholes to them, and what's the trauma of a few unknown nobodies to politicians when they have their pearls to clutch and votes to secure?
I think I changed her mind that day, but it's difficult to care when people are still dying for and/or having their lives turned upside-down over dead tissue.
