This has been heavy on my head as I have read article, after article, after article, and watch video after video, after video of women being denied care as they stumble over the trigger laws that states put up as law to deny abortion to women.
I have read about the denial of care for a miscarriage which is losing a fetus before 20 weeks, and denial of care for an abortion, which is losing a fetus after 20 weeks. Or there is a miscarriage in process but the heart hasn’t stopped yet and nothing can be done to relieve women of carrying a doomed pregnancy. I mean the mental dissonance alone makes your head hurt.
Women are getting ill. There are infections that are sequelae (that means consequences) to carrying a dead baby that they are denied proper medical care for because doctors and hospitals are afraid of running afoul of the laws. And they should be, especially the laws that state that a layperson can sue for even the idea that a doctor helped a woman end a pregnancy and these laypeople are incentivized to do so by the $10,000 bounty on the doctors, or the driver who took a woman who was in pain and losing a pregnancy. This was a bad idea when Texas started it in September 2021 and other states have jumped on the bandwagon. Someone is making money off of someone else’s misery.
Got it.
Women are bleeding. I heard from another nurse that their patient had a hemoglobin of 6 and she was bleeding heavily and passing clots. And they were still denied treatment. Normal hemoglobin numbers for women are 12-15. At least half of the oxygen carrying cells of the woman’s blood were gone. These are cells that carry oxygen, which is something your organs cannot live without, to the organs and tissues of the body, and carry carbon dioxide from the organs and tissues of the bodies back to the lungs were it is exhaled. A hemoglobin of 6 is is a medical emergency, verging on the number that is not recoverable from for the woman.
Still others are being told that while there is a miscarriage in process after no cardiac activity is found during an ultrasound that nothing can be done without a second ultrasound to confirm there is no cardiac function, and a third to confirm again. And the women are left with this burden of a failed pregnancy, and have to go through a degrading ultrasound twice to confirm what it already known. This woman has to be told three times that the baby is dead before any action can be taken.
I mean, what the actual fuck?
And the infections can lead to a woman being unable to get pregnant, or carry a pregnancy. Where is the outrage about that? It is bad enough that we, as women, are told that our bodies are not our own and we can have no say over what happens to them. But women who very much want to get pregnant can have a miscarriage. And if they are in certain states they are not medically treated in a timely manner and this can lead to them being unable to every have a child.
And you are okay with that?
Women who have gone through this kangaroo court that we are all living in are suffering. And some of them are deciding not to have more children, or children at all, rather that go through this catastrophe again. And that is a compounding tragedy.
Next up on their docket of what they want not bound by laws will be gay marriage. Or maybe birth control so that they can have utter control over women. Because it is always and has always been about control. Someone, somewhere is doing something that a section of society doesn’t agree with and THEY MUST BE STOPPED!
I’m frightened and I am a married, white women in my late 40s.
It is unfathomable what others are going through.
Because a section of society doesn’t understand.
Can’t understand.
Won’t try to understand.
f you are not frightened, you should be.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 