Who could possibly have foreseen this?

Texas doctors and hospitals are now so fearful of being arrested for providing an “abortion” that they are now delaying urgent medical care to a woman who may have a life-threatening condition as a result of abnormal fertilization and an embryo or fetus that is now threatening a woman’s life.

From the Dallas Morning News:

The Texas Medical Association wants regulators to step in after hospitals reportedly refused to treat patients with serious pregnancy complications for fear of violating the state’s abortion ban. In a letter sent Wednesday to the Texas Medical Board, the association said it received complaints that hospitals, their administrators and their lawyers may be prohibiting physicians from providing medically appropriate care to women with ectopic pregnancies and other complications.

Since last September, Texas physicians have already had to contend with a law known as Senate Bill 8 that empowers citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” in an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Fearing litigation, some providers have delayed abortions until patients’ conditions became life-threatening, according to a paper authored by Texas-based researchers and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Texas hospitals fearing abortion law delay pregnant women’s care, medical association says https://t.co/SmL5XRk9Ii

— Dallas Morning News (@dallasnews) July 16, 2022

Republicans have been saying this wouldn’t happen. But it is happening.

“One in Central Texas allegedly told a physician not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured, which puts patient health at serious risk, according to the letter.” https://t.co/sincQIpF2b

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) July 15, 2022

Yes, it is happening, and everyone knew it would happen. Here is what everyone also knew. Rich white women don’t have problems in these situations. The rich white woman is not having her treatment delayed because no prosecutor is coming after a doctor for saving the life of a rich white woman. The woman whose life is in danger is the young, poor, Hispanic woman. The hospital and the doctor are not willing to risk that a prosecutor won’t see that woman’s life as mattering as much as the fetus’s “life.”

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman