Shanae Smith-Cunningham arrived at Memorial Regional Hospital on Dec. 21, 2022 — five days after her water broke, only halfway through her pregnancy. Despite her pleas for treatment and the risks to her health, staff at the Hollywood, Fla., hospital turned her away amid the state’s new abortion restrictions.
The decision to send Smith-Cunningham home put her life in peril, health officials later determined
Translation: We’re fucked.
The Supreme Court is happy to ban elective abortions. It’s not clear that they’re willing to accept a ban of ones where the woman’s life is in danger and the fetus isn’t going to survive.
The conservative majority clearly hates women and will do the worst thing, which will be keeping it vague enough that doctors are afraid to provide care while not making it an outright ban just like several states have implemented an effective ban without making it explicit.
If the conservative justices cared about women’s safety at all they would just recognize the right to pregnant women’s bodily automomy. Then they could balance that with a viabke fetus and end up with the exact same outcome as Roe v Wade. But since they threw that in the trash openly, we aren’t getting back there while they are on the bench.
Even if they’re hesitant to do that, in the states with any kind of abortion ban, the standard of evidence for any of the exceptions to apply and the delays in processing means that no doctor or patient can safely make that call before it’s too late, effectively making the ban total.
And yet, what does that even mean?
That’s an important question: if the court is specific in its answer, women will at least sometimes be able to access emergency medical care. If not, doctors won’t be willing to risk a murder conviction to help.
This is an aside, but I absolutely loathe the term “elective abortion” I want all parents to become parents with forethought and intent. We’ve seen how disastrous it can be for children to grow up in un-loving households and it’d be wonderful if we could minimize how many future children have to suffer that.
Let all pregnancies be intentioned and wanted and realize that accidental pregnancies brought on by two people having some fun shouldn’t force parenthood on a couple that don’t desire it. Let pregnancy be elective and allow abortions to be a tool for people who don’t want to transition their lives into parenthood.
(This isn’t a criticism of the parent comment, but that term just pisses me off)
And it’s all because we let those barriers stop us after the Dobbs decision. They’re going to keep doing this shit until we drag their asses out into the street.