Docs have been talking about what’s going on behind the scenes while they wait for the Supreme Court to rule on emergency abortions. One doctor, Dr. Lauren Miller, who specializes in fetus and maternal medicine, talked about how she would feel if she had to tell her patients that she cannot help them.
Dr. Miller lives in Idaho, which has one of the toughest abortion laws. This meant that she could only have an abortion on a woman if her life was in danger. So, many women who weren’t quite “sick enough to qualify” ended up in situations that could have killed them.
“I could only say, ‘We need to get them out of state,'” Dr. Miller said. She talks about the time before Idaho’s ban and says, “It just breaks my heart that I knew them and had a relationship with them and couldn’t give them the same care that I could have given them a year ago.”
A federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act says that any hospital that takes in a Medicare patient has to use Medicare funds to secure them. Dr. Miller said that this was a bit of a loophole. If a woman’s life was in danger and she needed an abortion, they would have to give it to her. If they couldn’t keep her stable, they would have to officially take her somewhere else.
But the Supreme Court’s decision on emergency abortions could also get rid of this law totally. That’s why many doctors are on edge while they wait for the decision.
“How dangerous does a patient have to be or how sick does a person have to get before it’s okay to give them the care they need?” “Yes,” said Dr. Stacy Seyb, another expert in maternal medicine in Idaho.
