Abortion rights and anti-abortion activists demonstrate in Washington, DC during the first March for Life after Roe rally in January. The decision triggered strict abortion bans in more than a dozen states.
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Abortion rights and anti-abortion activists demonstrate in Washington, DC during the first March for Life after Roe rally in January. The decision triggered strict abortion bans in more than a dozen states.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
The egg pregnancy Jaci Statton will never be a child. It Cancerin spite of.
At the last hospital in Oklahoma she went to during her probation last month, Statton said staff told her and her husband she couldn’t have an abortion until her illness got worse.
Statton, 25, says: “They are very sincere; They’re not trying to be mean. “They say, ‘The best thing we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we’ll be there to help you. But we can’t touch you except for that. when you hit us in the face or your blood pressure goes up to the point where you’re about to have a heart attack.'”
Oklahoma has three overlapping abortion bans, with different and sometimes contradictory definitions and exceptions. Research third edition together with a Lancet commentary Medical journals show that hospitals across Oklahoma are having a hard time interpreting the law and creating policies that comply with the state’s abortion ban. The confusion has dangerous consequences for women like Statton.
Survey ‘Simulated Patient’
For the study, the Oklahoma Center for Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Justice Calls and Doctors for Human Rights surveyed 34 hospitals across the state. The researchers found that most hospitals were unable to provide any information about their policies or procedures or explain what support would be provided to physicians who determined that breaking pregnancy is necessary to save the patient’s life.
To conduct the study, several young women called 34 hospitals in the state with a scenario saying they were pregnant for the first time, trying to decide which hospital in Oklahoma to get care and wanted to understand. hospital policies and procedures for the delivery of health care services. abortion if pregnancy complications arise. “It’s called the ‘secret shopper’ method – we call it the ‘simulated patient’ approach,” says Dr. Michele HeislerProfessor at the University of Michigan and medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, one of the study’s authors.
“What we didn’t anticipate was what we found – confusion, conflicting claims, misinformation,” Heisler said. For example, “Three out of 34 hospitals said they would never provide abortions,” although there are exceptions documented in the law. Four hospitals said doctors needed to go through an approval process to be able to provide medically necessary abortions, and 14 gave a equivocal answer on whether there was an approval process. like that or not.
Oklahoma State Board of Medical Licensing provide guidance in september to doctors in the state on how to navigate abortion bans, but declined NPR’s request for an interview, citing ongoing litigation. Oklahomans for Life, an anti-abortion rights advocacy group, did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
‘A woman’s body is like an incubator’
Heisler cautions that it can’t be said that the study definitively shows that Oklahoma hospitals don’t have clear policies or guidelines on how to apply these abortion laws, only that those policies don’t. available to simulated patients who have attempted to obtain that information.
“I think one of the scariest statements, was that in one of the hospitals, a person was trying to reassure her and she said, ‘Oh, you know, in a medical emergency, we will try to use the woman’s body as an incubator to try and keep the pregnancy going for as long as possible,'” Heisler said.
“No one should blame the hospitals,” she added. “They’ve been put in an unresolvable situation.”
High health stakes, political potential
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt pledge to sign “every pro-life rule appeared on my desk.” He kept that promise. One of three abortion bans in Oklahoma comes with criminal penalties including felony and up to 5 years in prison for anyone who administers, prescribes, or “consults” a woman to have an abortion. The stakes for interpreting the law correctly are very high for doctors and hospitals.
A big problem is how to understand the exception when someone’s life is in danger. State Supreme Court rule at the end of March that abortion should be permitted when the patient’s life is in danger even if there is no medical emergency. The state legislature also consider new exceptions to the abortion ban, and many lawsuits are underway.
The case in which the Stattons were asked to wait in the parking lot until Jaci’s condition became life-threatening happened two weeks before the Oklahoma Supreme Court weighed in to clarify exceptions for state ban.
‘This needs to change’
Jaci Statton’s pregnancy challenge started in late February. She is a housewife who lives near Shawnee in central Oklahoma. She and her husband, Dustin Statton, have three children – two seven years old and one eight years old. Dustin is an oilfield technician and they run a fishing guide business – she says she and her family go fishing every day.
After weeks of feeling terrible – nausea, dizziness and weakness – Statton suddenly experienced heavy bleeding that sent her to the emergency room. At her OB-GYN the next day, she knew she had a kind of pregnancy mo, in which some tissues are cancerous. Molar pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg has too many chromosomes. It did not develop into a viable fetus. It is usually a benign condition, but in about 15% of cases, like Jaci’s, it is cancerous. Her doctor told her she was at risk of bleeding and even death, but she couldn’t be treated there.
The treatment for a patient in her condition is dilation and curettage or D&C – an abortion procedure to remove fetal tissue from the uterus. Over the course of a week, over and over again, she said the doctors told her they couldn’t care for her.
After a week of being transferred to three different hospitals in Oklahoma, Statton says her doctors actually suggested she leave the state and go to a place where abortion is legal.
In the end, she and Dustin drove three hours to an abortion clinic in Kansas, where she was able to get a D&C. She is currently facing another surgery to remove more cancerous tissue and she may need chemotherapy. Mentally, she said, it was tough.
“I think something needs to be done” about Oklahoma’s abortion law, Statton said. That feeling prompted her to openly talk about her experience. “I don’t know how else to get attention, but this needs to change.”
Statton wanted to try and make sure no one else had the same experience.
