DeSantis Comes For The Ob-Gyns
Well, this was expected.
Ever since the Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, doctors in states with abortion bans and supposed exceptions to those abortion bans have been saying that the laws regarding when they can and can’t perform an abortion under the “exceptions” are not clear enough. And the thing is, they need to be really clear, because if a doctor does perform an abortion and a conservative judge decides it just wasn’t enough of an emergency, they can lose their license or go to prison.
This is what is currently happening in Florida. Women’s health care is in danger because doctors don’t know where the line is.
Naturally, Governor Ron DeSantis has listened intently to their issues and responded to them by working with a team of actual physicians to make the law more clear with regards to when doctors are allowed to act. Just kidding! He is doing the opposite of that.
“If they are in a situation where a mother has a miscarriage and they say you can’t get treated for it — that’s a lie. So you’re either too incompetent to be a doctor because you can’t read, which case you should lose your medical license,” DeSantis said at a rally against the abortion rights ballot amendment. “Or you’re putting your political agenda ahead of the health of your patients, in which case you should not be a doctor in the state of Florida.”
It’s not a lie. The doctors are not incompetent. They just know more about these situations than Ron DeSantis does.
It’s just not as black and white of a situation as Ron DeSantis thinks it is. There are situations where doctors just cannot be 10,000 percent sure that a woman will die if she does not get a therapeutic abortion.
Just today ProPublica reported that a woman in Texas, Joselli Barnica, died after doctors refused for 40 hours to treat her ongoing miscarriage.
There is also the fact that the procedures and drugs used to manage a miscarriage are the same as to perform an abortion — and in many cases, doctors are scared that performing a D&C or something similar could be misinterpreted by anti-abortion creeps as an abortion. That is what happened with a woman in Idaho who spent 19 days miscarrying before she could get treatment.
Doctors have sued the state of Idaho for clarification on what constitutes a “medical emergency.” Patients have sued Texas for the same reason. Neither state wants to clarify and, clearly, neither does Florida.
This is perhaps yet another problem caused by Republicans truly believing that they learned everything there is to know about science in elementary school. They assume that these situations are always going to be clear cut and obvious because they don’t know enough about them to understand that that isn’t always the case. Doctors, however, know that predicting these situations is not an exact science and that it is better to act early than to take the risk of waiting.
If all of the ob-gyns everywhere are saying these laws are unclear and Republicans have no interest in further clarifying them, then it seems that there is a distinct chance that they actually want these exceptions to be vague as hell, for the explicit purpose of getting to “catch” a doctor performing a therapeutic abortion too early.
And let’s be real — it’s hard to put anything past Ron DeSantis at this point.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Oh, you are FAR too kind.
They know. They know doctors are paralyzed by the fear of a GOP prosecutor coming after them. They want doctors paralyzed by that fear so they comply.
They want women afraid of dying, so women don't get to live independently from their rules and don't get full ownership over themselves.
They aren't ignorant. They're malicious.
Somehow, even from a fairly young age, I understood that the abortion issue, from the right, was not really about unborn children. It obviously implicated women's sexual freedom, sex outside of marriage, the sexual revolution. But the issue went deeper still, and in the last few years it's become pretty clear that the right had a clear vision of what bodily control by women meant: That they couldn't be kept pregnant, under a medical disability, dependent on men, unable to compete in the workplace, and able to demand their proper place in running and governing society if they had the right to control pregnancy in their own bodies. Women who can control when they give birth don't become teenage moms, can pursue education and compete in all the fields of social endeavor. It was an ancient truth they understood, that the trick of biology had worked against women all these millennia in achieving true equality. If they can take that away, women revert to a lesser role. If pregnancy becomes more dangerous and disabling, all the better from their perspective. It is truly central to the conservative vision for society that repoductive choice goes away. And it will necessarily involve birth control, absolutely. They will not stop.