In Texas, where doctors face up to 99 years of prison if convicted of performing an illegal abortion, medical and legal experts say the law is complicating decision-making around emergency pregnancy care.
Although the state law says termination of ectopic pregnancies is not considered abortion, the draconian penalties scare Texas doctors from treating those patients,
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Alternatively, we could not have laws that jail doctors from doing the right thing.
The real coward’s choice would be to simply leave the state. These laws are absolutely draconian and awful and there are no good choices.
I have to disagree here. These laws are putting doctors in a position where they cannot help their patients at all. Is it really cowardice to leave one state where you cannot help your patients at all in order to move to another state where you can at least help some people?
Or what about those who have chosen to leave the state, but set up shop juuuuust over the border in a neighboring state so they can at least indirectly continue to provide care to their patients by being as close as possible?
I don’t blame the doctors for making the choice that they feel will serve the most people in need under these circumstances. The real cowards are the ones who voted for these draconian laws in the first place instead of standing up to their own party and saying “Hey, what the fuck are we doing?”. And the real cowards are the ones who will vote to uphold these laws or re-elect the ghouls who enacted them in the first place. But the doctors are absolutely not the cowards.
That’s not cowardice, it’s pragmatism.
Honestly we should have a constitutional amendment that “congress nor the states shall make no law to prevent people from obtaining a medical procedure if they cannot show it is worse than not undergoing the procedure for the person seeking care.” This would also pre-empt trans healthcare bans, as a plus.
Way too much wiggle room there.
“Neither Congress nor the States shall enact any law prohibiting a person from obtaining a medical procedure that the patient and their licensed medical professionals deem necessary to preserve the person’s life or health. Neither Congress nor the States shall enact any law requiring any medical professional from providing any services that violate their religious or personal beliefs.”
SImple. If abortion is against your own personal or religious beliefs, nobody is forcing you to give one. But Congress can’t just go and stop a person from finding someone willing (and legally qualified) to provide such services if she deems it necessary. Win-win except for the holier-than-thou Karens of the world who feel the need for forcing their viewpoints onto others. They can go fuck a cactus for all I care, though.
Your statement does not give the portrayal of bravado that you think it does. It gives off the cowardice of a keyboard warrior who knows that his words have no consequences and he will never have to actually make that kind of decision.
Let me know when you are willing to put your career, your freedom, and your family’s financial security at significant risk in order to help a complete stranger.
Uh, ok.
So, is this you saying that you will put your freedom and your family at risk to help someone?
To be clear, I am a third year medical student that wants to go into emergency medicine, and I’m already looking for ways to challenge this kind of bullshit to protect my patients. Thankfully, I live in a state that has actually set itself up as a refuge for reproductive healthcare (Minnesota), but I’d just get more creative about it if I lived somewhere else.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is…would you? I want an actual, honest answer that takes your own life and situation into consideration.
Why haven’t you flown down there to help? Because you’re a coward?
It’s the trolley problem made manifest. Help one person and possibly kill a dozen others, or let one person probably die so that you can possibly help more.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and regardless of which you choose, you’re the monster. This is exactly what Republicans want. Either these doctors risk everything to save these women, or they try to help everybody else and get hate from people like you. That anger would be better spent on the people who put these laws into place and the people who voted for them and support these draconian laws.
What oath? The hippocratic oath? The unenforced and unenforceable oath that’s actually meaningless?
If it’s meaningless to you, I understand your willingness to kowtow to fascists and their policies.
You’re failing to see that the oath is BETTER served by the original commenter’s point:
if I get close to violating the state law, even with the federal protection, I can lose my license and possibly go to jail, then the uncountable other women I could have helped with less severe problems don’t have a doctor. I would do more harm to more people by trying to perform this abortion.
And that’s the point, it’s fucked either way.
I mean, I get it, but you know as well as I am that they are going to keep slicing the salami. How many women are you willing to let die, to make die, before you say enough?
I’ve never had to think less about blocking someone.
Cowardly to protect more lives by remaining a doctor? Cowardly to not throw his life into chaos to help people who statistically probably voted for this new paradigm or didn’t bother voting at all? How about primary elections where turnout is 10%? He’s supposed to martyr his life to help Idiocracy win? Decades of top scores and academic rigor should be eager to die?
No. I don’t think doctors are the cowards here. I think this is the situation that people voted for. This is where apathy has taken us.
You do realize that the traditional Hippocratic and Osteopathic oaths forbid abortions, right? A lot of physicians adhere to more modern versions, but if you’re going by the traditional Hippocratic oath, you’re just talking out your ass about something you don’t actually understand the context and consequences of.
Edit: It appears that I should clarify some things. I do not agree with the original Hippocratic or Osteopathic oaths. I refuse to take them, and have instead written my own for myself and my firmly held beliefs. Abortion and euthanasia are expressly forbidden by the original oaths, and there are still quite a few physicians that point to those oaths to excuse themselves from violating conservative religious beliefs on those topics. I support the right to abortions, and the right to die with dignity. It’s still important to recognize that the original oaths that many physicians (old and new) ascribe to forbid these, and that they will use those oaths as an excuse to violate patients’ rights in favor of their own beliefs.