RH Reality Check has a column by a woman who lives in Mexico and provides health care for women there. It's a warning our country needs to heed. It's a slippery slope from what has been done these last years in preventing women from making decisions with their doctors...to actually charging them with a crime.
Turning Health Care Providers into Prosecutors: Mexico’s Warnings for US WomenFor the last 30 years, I have been living and working in Mexico. In July a young woman, barely out of her teens, visited the clinic I helped found in the state of Guanajuato. She asked for a pregnancy test and assumed there would be confidentiality. She was wrong. The local justice ministry demanded that the clinic provide the results of her test to them, as she was under investigation for illegal abortion after seeking medical attention at a public hospital for vaginal bleeding and pain.
In early October this same young woman was advised that her case was officially dropped due to insufficient evidence. Her nightmare, which started in an emergency room with a brutal interrogation and included inappropriate questioning about her personal sex life by the General Attorney’s Office, is seemingly over. Both this young woman and the clinic personnel, including me and my husband, faced the real possibility of incarceration – in our case because we did not hand over the confidential information of our patient.
The writer speaks freely about her disappointment with how restrictions are being placed on women's rights here in the US.
As a woman and a public health and human rights activist I am incensed by what is happening in my adopted country. And I am baffled and saddened about what is happening in the United States, my motherland, afraid for my daughter and for my sons, and for all U.S. residents. Soon after the time I first went to the clinic in New York 40 years ago, the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision secured my right as a woman to have access to abortion services on demand. Over many decades I felt secure and protected. Not anymore... especially when I see men and women running in U.S. senate races with a platform that includes overriding Roe v Wade. It is more than disturbing to see Attorneys General in the United States dedicating themselves to rewriting hospital regulations with the purported mission of increased safety for women while in fact they are dismantling the already insufficient supply of abortion providers in their states.
She asks a very pertinent question about the role of these doctors.
The current law in Guanajuato, and the barrage of restrictions being enacted against women throughout Mexico and in the United States and elsewhere poses a test first and foremost for the medical community: Do health care providers serve their patients? Or are they supposed to ignore medical ethics, good science and human need to serve as informants for state prosecutors and others?
The writer refers to a New York Times article in September that tells of the new crackdowns on abortions in Mexico.
Many States in Mexico Crack Down on AbortionHere in the state of Guanajuato, where Roman Catholic conservatives have controlled government for more than 15 years, it is standard procedure to investigate suspected cases of abortion. But Guanajuato is no anomaly, women’s rights advocates and some health officials say, since a broad move to enforce antiabortion laws has gained momentum in other parts of Mexico.
One reason is a backlash against Mexico City’s decision three years ago to permit legal abortion to any woman in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. After the Supreme Court upheld that law in 2008, 17 states passed constitutional amendments declaring that life begins at conception, even though abortion was already illegal everywhere but Mexico City, except in cases of rape or to save a mother’s life.
“It is a political response,” said Pedro Salazar, a legal scholar at the Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “This is a well-coordinated initiative. It’s not a spontaneous decision.”
In my mind the constant right moves here in our country to restrict women's choices are indeed a political choice. They are geared to appeal to the far right, and they are geared to help a party win elections.
That is shamelessly playing politics with a woman's rights and choices. There have even been efforts in Mexiceo to charge women who had miscarriages with breaking abortion laws...and they have been sent to jail. It could happen here.
In states where antiabortion laws are strictly enforced, there can also be a fine line between charging a woman with abortion and sentencing her for killing a newborn. In the gulf state of Veracruz, the state women’s institute found this year that eight women serving sentences for homicide — killing their babies after they had been born alive — had either had abortions, which has a much lighter penalty, or had miscarriages or stillbirths. They have since been released, according to the institute’s departing director.
Eight women in Guanajuato have also been jailed on homicide charges in recent years, stirring a debate over whether the authorities have used the crime as a way to pursue tougher sentences against women who had had abortions, or perhaps simply lost a baby during pregnancy.
There have been some cases that are shocking here in our own country. The mixing of religion and medical decisions has increased since neither party really stands up for full reproductive rights for women.
Denying women health care based on religious views"In 1998, the Louisiana State University Medical Center in Shreveport refused to provide an abortion for Michelle Lee, a woman with cardiomyopathy who was on the waiting list for a heart transplant, despite her cardiologist's warning that the pregnancy might kill her. Hospital policy dictated that to qualify for an abortion, a woman's risk of dying had to be greater than 50 percent if her pregnancy was carried to term; a committee of physicians ruled that Lee did not meet this criterion. Since her cardiomyopathy made an outpatient abortion too dangerous, she traveled 100 miles to Texas by ambulance to have her pregnancy terminated."
In another case a woman whose water had broken at 14 weeks could not get proper care without traveling 80 miles due to hospital policy.
She was only 14 weeks pregnant, but her water had broken. Dr. Goldner delivered the bad news: Because there wasn't enough amniotic fluid left and it was too early for the fetus to survive on its own, the pregnancy was hopeless. Hutchins would likely miscarry in a matter of weeks. But in the meanwhile, she stood at risk for serious infection, which could lead to infertility or death. Dr. Goldner says his devastated patient chose to get an abortion at local Elliot Hospital. But there was a problem. Elliot had recently merged with nearby Catholic Medical Center—and as a result, the hospital forbade abortions.
"I was told I could not admit her unless there was a risk to her life," Dr. Goldner remembers. "They said, 'Why don't you wait until she has an infection or she gets a fever?' They were asking me to do something other than the standard of care. They wanted me to put her health in jeopardy." He tried admitting Hutchins elsewhere, only to discover that the nearest abortion provider was nearly 80 miles away in Lebanon, New Hampshire—and that she had no car. Ultimately, Dr. Goldner paid a taxi to drive her the hour and a half to the procedure. (The hospital merger has since dissolved, and Elliot is secular once again.)
There are some things that are worth taking a political risk to support.
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