Hospitals are facing questions about why they denied care to pregnant patients and whether state abortion bans have influenced how they treat those patients.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, sent inquiries to nine hospitals ahead of a hearing Tuesday looking at whether abortion bans have prevented or delayed pregnant women from getting help during their miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or other medical emergencies.
Republicans on Tuesday assailed the hearing, with outright denials about the impact abortion laws have on the medical care women in the U.S. have received, and called the hearing a politically-motivated attack just weeks ahead of the presidential election. Republicans, who are noticeably nervous about how the new abortion laws will play into the presidential race, lodged repeated complaints about the hearing’s title, “How Trump Criminalized Women’s Health Care.”
That’s really upsetting. I tend to forget that the healthcare industry in the US has to rely on cold hard calculations like this in the background. It really takes the person out of the patient.
Emergency doctors should have some kind of qualified immunity like what cops have, but the opposite, really, because it should protect them from prosecution when they make a medical decision that results in someone’s life being saved. The law shouldn’t even be a consideration when someone is dying in front of you and you have the ability to save them.