This week, the House Judiciary Committee will be holding a hearing entitled: “The Texas Abortion Ban and its Devastating Impact on Communities and Families.” The title foreshadows the conclusions the panelists are likely to reach, conspicuously coinciding with the December 1 Supreme Court oral arguments on the increasingly politicized abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization. However, both the panel and the Court would do well to set aside politics and pre-determined outcomes and base their decisions and recommendations on medically-based, peer-reviewed evidence on the impact of elective abortion on healthcare.
All too often, I’ve seen what happens to my patients when politics enter healthcare in the form of medically uninformed policies. If the panel were genuinely interested in exploring a “devastating impact on communities and families,” it would do well to examine the catastrophic effects of abortions on women. At many emergency rooms in the country, where I practice included, when medical complications emerge after an abortion at a clinic, women are unceremoniously left on gurneys, often unable to articulate their medical history. Even though lack of communication during patient handoff has been found to be one of the leading causes of preventable medical errors, legally, the abortion provider who performed the procedure is under no obligation to provide any information. Further, many times the complications result from a lack of medical knowledge by the abortion provider. It is a little-known fact that abortion clinics nationwide can contract the services of non-Ob-Gyns to perform abortions. I am not aware of another profession in which uninformed legal policies regulate the health market for women in such an arbitrary way. Just as an endodontist would not allow a heart surgeon—however well-trained-- to perform a root canal, a podiatrist should not be able to perform an abortion. In short, when it comes to women’s health, in the name of reproductive “rights,” the abortion industry and its allies are willing to lower the most basic healthcare standards.
The argument for the existence of these under-credentialed abortion clinics follows the rationale that women who wish to undergo an abortion would otherwise have to resort to unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Yet, ironically, abortion clinics often replicate the same unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Furthermore, these clinics evade the fundamental tenets of informed medical consent that apply to the entire medical industry. The clinics eliminate any discussion about the potential medical effects of the procedure women are about to undergo. Often what little counseling women do receive is done in group settings. These clinics, in short, are not ethical or honest in their approach to health. Thanks to numerous medical advances, we know that pregnancy involves much more than just our reproductive organs. Conversely, we know that an elective abortion can have considerable adverse physical
Legislators who truly care about women would stress that just as we need more accountability from healthcare practitioners treating women, we also need more data. Although local and national government agencies collect health information, abortion-related deaths are not tracked, and medical coding of these deaths is complex. Thus, deaths and complications are systematically hidden from data sets. However, the few sites that collect data, such as the Finnish STAKES database, demonstrate there is an increased risk of death for women who undergo elective abortion compared to women who undergo live birth.
Sadly, it’s not only legislators that care more about politics than women’s health. Even though 90% of Ob-Gyns do not perform abortions, when the pandemic struck, and before issuing any guidance on the treatment of pregnant women who contracted COVID-19, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) rushed to make the case that abortion was essential care. This is not the first time ACOG has decided to solely serve a minority of politically inclined advocates within its organization. With the lobbying arm it created in 2008 funded largely by its members’ dues, ACOG has also advocated eliminating parental notification for minors undergoing an abortion, against informed-consent laws, and in favor of taxpayer-funded abortions.
What would truly be beneficial for communities and families, is if the Hill would set aside politics and address the absence of data collection associated with pregnant women who die while undergoing an abortion performed by an unskilled medical professional, the devastating physical and emotional impact of abortion on women, and the emerging institutional politically-based disdain for the majority of physicians who take our Hippocratic Oath seriously.
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