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,
I think they would rather avoid an immediate conflict with their own managers and the more zealous members of the community than to take any amount of personal risk to their careers. And, as a result, they are leaving an uncountable number of people to suffer and die, because they no longer have any confidence in the American medical system.
The costs associated with not making the choice rack up every time good people refuse to act.
If we’re serious about delivering care to every woman that needs it, we can expand Medicaid to cover everyone without insurance and have the DOJ step in to provide legal aid to any doctor caught in the legal crossfire.
This isn’t just a problem of doctors. Its a political problem as well. But the doctors are the people on the front lines. If they are too terrified to even make the attempt to deliver services to people in need, no woman is safe and the volume of untreated patients will continue to balloon.
So much so that its practically a joke.
But the solution to the trolley problem is to stop the trolley, not to console yourself by driving down a track where you can’t see as many people.
You’re agreeing that this is a political problem, but you’re still putting the impetus and responsibility on the physician in that situation. If we’re using the trolley problem as an example, the person holding the switch to choose between the 5 people in harm’s way, or actively switching it to one person who currently isn’t in harm’s way…the switch just changes the track direction. That person doesn’t have access to brakes, or a “derail” option. The physician in that situation has to choose between actively leaving one person in harm’s way, or allowing many people to suffer down the line.
Personally, I don’t have kids, I’m not going to have kids, and it’s just me and my husband. I don’t have a whole family of lives to ruin by getting into legal trouble by running afoul of this, but I don’t blame the physicians who do have a lot to lose. Also, I know enough about the legal system and how medical documentation and coding work to make it tough for the hypothetical prosecutor to pin things on me. Hell, I’m still a student and I’m thinking up ways to play this horrible game they’ve set up, and I think some of my solutions will be pretty clever if I ever have to use them. I will not be sharing any of those ideas, but I have quite a few of them.
The physician who engages with these laws becomes a political actor. Medical centers don’t have a political commissar sitting around enforcing the party line, they’ve got civilian staff and administration. The choice they make in enacting or ignoring these laws is a political one.
The physician makes the choice of who to save in the moment, and then private administrators, local law enforcement, and courts decide how many people suffer down the line.
More power to you. But whatever you do (or refuse to do) is as political a decision as anything your bosses and local government enact above you.
Well, time to Godwin’s Law this discussion I guess.
What you’re suggesting is an expectation for physicians to do something akin to actively defying the Nazi regime to hide/evacuate/personally protect vulnerable people who the Nazis are trying to round up. The people in Nazi Germany who put their lives and livelihoods on the line to help shield people from the concentration camps are unequivocally heroes in every sense of the word.
It is unreasonable to expect, much less demand true heroism from people who are trying to live their lives. Right now, the penalties for performing an illegal abortion in Texas are loss of your medical license and a minimum of 5 years’ imprisonment, and maximum of 99 years’ imprisonment, as well as a $100,000 fine per instance. (They are very generous though, in that if the fetus miraculously survives, it’s only a second degree felony that carries a mandatory sentence of 2 to 20 years).
You are effectively insisting that physicians put in this position must put their entire profession, career, livelihood, and potentially even their life on the line in the hopes that the politically selected prosecutor elects to not pursue charges. That’s a hell of a gamble without even beginning to consider the impact of the loss of a physician would have on their community.
This is a political problem with a political solution, but despite my own intentions and moral convictions, I would never presume to insist that another physician puts everything on the line to stand up to the modern Nazi party. (because, let’s be honest, that’s what the GOP is now.)